If the foolishness, negligence, idleness, and short-sightedness of States did not involve their occasional collision, it is difficult to imagine the degree of degeneracy to which the human race would descend. War is one of the conditions of progress, the sting which prevents a country from going to sleep, and compels satisfied mediocrity itself to awaken from its apathy. Man is only sustained by effort and struggle. The day that humanity achieves a great pacific Roman Empire, having no external enemies, that day its morality and its intelligence will be placed in the very greatest peril.
In our own times a philosophy not very dissimilar has been voiced in the public declarations of ex-President Roosevelt. I choose a few phrases from his speeches and writings, at random:
We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who submits to insult. What is true of a man ought to be true of a nation.[44]
We must play a great part in the world, and especially ... perform those deeds of blood, of valor, which above everything else bring national renown.
We do not admire a man of timid peace.
By war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.
In this world the nation that is trained to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound to go down in the end before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities.[45]
Professor William James covers the whole ground of these claims in the following passage:
The war party is assuredly right in affirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more universal and enduring competitive passion.... Pacifism makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality, nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth these things; that, taking human nature as a whole, war is its best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford to adopt a peace economy.... Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human life without hardihood would be contemptible.... This natural feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of army writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regard war as a biological or sociological necessity.... Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us.[46]
Even famous English clergymen have voiced the same view. Charles Kingsley, in his defence of the Crimean War as a "just war against tyrants and oppressors," wrote: "For the Lord Jesus Christ is not only the Prince of Peace, He is the Prince of War, too. He is the Lord of Hosts, the God of armies, and whoever fights in a just war against tyrants and oppressors is fighting on Christ's side, and Christ is fighting on his side. Christ is his captain and his leader, and he can be in no better service. Be sure of it, for the Bible tells you so."[47]
Canon Newbolt, Dean Farrar, and the Archbishop of Armagh, have all written not dissimilarly.
The whole case may be summarized thus:
1. Nations fight for opposing conceptions of right: it is the moral conflict of men.
2. They fight from non-rational causes of a lower kind: from vanity, rivalry, pride of place, the desire to occupy a great situation in the world, or from sheer hostility to dissimilar people—the blind strife of mutually hating men.