Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/386

 insists upon treaties, constitutions, legitimacies, and charters; the legislative incessantly assails these. Whenever some period of stress sets in, some great conflict between institutions and the forces in things, there comes a sorting out of these two types of mind. The legal mind becomes glorified and transfigured in the form of hopeless loyalty, the creative mind inspires revolutions and reconstructions. And particularly is this difference of attitude accentuated in the disputes that arise out of wars. In most modern wars there is no doubt quite traceable on one side or the other a distinct creative idea, a distinct regard for some future consequence; but the main dispute even in most modern wars and the sole dispute in most mediæval wars will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to the past; to turn upon a question of fact and right. The wars of Plantagenet and Lancastrian England with France, for example, were based entirely upon a dummy claim, supported by obscure legal arguments, upon the crown of France. And the arguments that centred about the late war in South Africa ignored any ideal of a great united South African state almost entirely, and quibbled this way and that about who began the fighting and what was or was not written in some obscure revision of a treaty a score of years ago. Yet beneath the legal issues the broad creative idea has been apparent in the public mind during this war. It will be found more or less definitely formulated beneath almost all the great wars of the past century, and a comparison of the wars of the nineteenth century with the wars of the middle ages