Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/40

 the soil and seas of Europe be reddened with blood, and the pain which knows no remedy shoot through millions of homes; and now the tragedy has opened, grimmer than the dourest prophet had ever pictured it. Why have we done this? Ultimately, because man, the primeval savage, knowing nothing of our systems of justice, laid it down that the knife or the club was the guardian of a man’s honour or property: proximately, because we of this highly cultivated age enthrone still one of the most ghastly shams which barbarism succeeded in enforcing on civilisation.

I have described it as a characteristic of our age that we are rising above the stream of traditions which flows from civilisation to civilisation, and are discovering that some of its sources are tainted. Now in the case of warfare this scrutiny of the origin and course of our traditions is comparatively easy. What we have discovered is so well known, and so little disputed, that it need hardly be related. It may be useful to state, at least, that very early man was probably not a combative and bloodthirsty savage. He lives to-day in such lowly peoples as the Veddahs and the Yahgans, and they are generally peaceful and averse from brawling. In this primitive man, however, there slumbered all the impulsive passion of earlier ancestors, and it was inevitable that a cultural rise should awaken it. When men became organised in tribes, when they became hunters and tillers of the soil, when they increased and wandered far afield, quarrels arose over women