Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/168

 have been necessary to build up the habit of steady work among tribes and nations. Races learned the habit of steady work, and sloughed off slavery.

War on the whole was long useful to humanity—expensive, but the best way we had. I have previously quoted Wells to show how it drew races into the circle of progress. Long before there was history even in popular ballad, some genius in some tribe of the Asiatic steppes invented the wheel. His tribe went to war and won or lost—that does not matter. Before the war was over, the enemy had seen the wheel, learned its usefulness, was making wheels of his own. But for war, outlying tribes on the fringe of humanity might have skidded their heavy burdens along the ground for centuries and æons. At the end of the Stone Age, some savage discovered that tin and copper, thrown into the fire, melted, blended, produced a substance which could be hammered to a fine, sharp edge—a tool much better than any chipped stone. He used his bronze knife in war; the enemy felt its edge, admired, penetrated the secret, passed it on by war to tribes still further outlying. So we progressed from the Stone Age to the age of metals.

War, too, worked with monarchism to develop what scholars call the group-consciousness. It stirred up in men a fine, high, human emotion for the humanity outside themselves. The average man in all times and all nations up to the eighteenth and