“God’s most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man—arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is His daughter.”
And to the same purpose writes Fletcher:
“Oh great corrector of enormous times,
Shaker of o’er-rank states—that heal’st with blood
The earth when it is sick.”
And yet the time of wars is past. We still have them, of course, and we still have a war-propaganda; but it would be easy to show that these wars are never military, but always commercial—that when two civilised states fight nowadays, it is not because they expect to subjugate each other, or desire to, but because their capitalists both need the same foreign market. I am acquainted with only one writer of any standing in the United States, Captain Mahan, who is nowadays willing even to hint that wars may still be necessary to the disciplining of a nation; and I think one might assert without fear of contradiction that people now go to war, not because they want to, but because they are persuaded they have to; and that right-thinking men throughout the world know that a war is a national calamity, a cause of evils innumerable, scarcely ever overbalanced by good.
And it is of the utmost importance to notice how this has been done; how it is that the military ideal is universally discredited in the world. It has not been due to the preachings of moralists and enthusiasts; it has not been brought about by the intervention of any deus ex machina. It has come about in the perfectly inevitable course of nature. No hero has arisen to slay the demon of war—the demon of war has slain himself. It is simply that the work of war is done. It is simply that war has brought about a survival of the fittest, and that there is no more need of conquest, and no possibility of it. The peoples have gone on to a different life, they have almost forgotten for thought of conquering, or of being conquered; they know that they cannot afford it; they know that their social organism is of too delicate a type to stand it; they can no more stand it than one of our modern captains of industry could stand the shock of jousting with Richard Cœur de Lion.