There is nothing more odious than the modern cant about peace. But a pontist soon learns that strife of every sort is a phase of war. Indeed, whether roads and bridges aid a pilgrimage of the sick, or an army of Crusaders, or a primitive migration, or the ramblings of charity, or the enterprise of monasteries; whether they help a mediæval pope at Avignon to thwart the land-hunger of a French king, or enable modern life to turn industrialism into a world-wide Armageddon whose scouts are lying advertisements; whatever they do or have done their history brings us in touch with the same human motive, a desire to win victories. James Martineau went so far as to picture the strife as absolutely barbaric. He said: “The battle for existence rages through all time and in every field; and its rule is to give no quarter--to despatch the maimed, to overtake the halt, to trip up the blind, and drive the fugitive host over the precipice into the sea.” Tennyson also went too far when he wrote about strife; too far, because he did no more than skim along the surface of a primordial truth, by which man’s history has been made a part of Nature’s. From Tennyson we gain no help at all; he tells us merely “that hope of answer or redress” must come from “behind the veil.” In his opinion Nature cares for nothing, so careless is she of the single life, and so ready to let a thousand types go. Yet her realms teem with miracles of contentious life, and I cannot think of any great extinct species that I should care very much to meet in a country walk. I do not wish to hob-nob with the Iguanodon, for instance. When John Stuart Mill complains that “nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are Nature’s everyday performances,” he forgets the far-reaching harm that men can do within the tolerance of “Old Father Antic, the Law”; and, besides this, he forgets to explain how a world of organisms ruled by hunger and thirst and passion, and dependent on innumerably various climates, could be other than Providence has decreed. To talk as Mill did is to imply that Nature sins against us, and against herself, when she allows any species to grow completely unfit for the gift of life. Yet her aim is to protect life from the suicidal fertility of lives, so that the whole economy of Nature demands death in the highest interests of the future. When we die we do an act of charity to our children and grandchildren; for if each of us lived to be active at ninety, the world would need a much smaller population of young people. It is our frail tenure of life that renders a high birthrate necessary; and progress gains more from the enterprise of vigorous youth than from the too cautious knowledge of old age. So I do not understand the pother raised by Mill and others over the benign discipline of death that Nature wields as a servant of the Eternal.