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 are legends of divine approval, it is true, but the clergy do not press them and they have little influence. War is a practice or institution which we clearly trace to the wild impulses and imperfect social forms of early man: even to the sheer passion of the beast that was still strong in him. No sophistry can obscure this bestial origin. We men and women of the twentieth century cling to one feature, at least, of an age on which we look back with high disdain: an age with which we would bitterly resent any comparison in point of intelligence and feeling. We may try to gild it with glittering phrases about a nation’s honour, but we know, all the while, that the honour of a nation no more demands that it shall dye its hands in the blood of a sister-nation than the honour of an individual requires so barbaric a consolation.

We maintain this sham in an age when mechanical progress has made such strides that it has turned the industry of war into our chief and most oppressive occupation. We cannot, with all our sacrifices, find the means to carry out most urgent reforms in our social life; we cannot put flesh on the bones and light in the eyes of poor children, or ease the lives of worn workers and helpless widows; because we need these, and even greater resources, to sharpen the sabre for our neighbour’s throat and enlarge the calibre of the tube that will scatter a hail of death. We have for years stood in such attitude confronting each other, we civilised nations, that on any day of any year the bugle might peal, and