It is stated that war is an inevitable feature of national life, and that it exercises a beneficent effect upon national character--that it fosters manliness and a respect for the virile attributes of courage, steadfastness and self-respect; that nations which have abandoned the art of war sink into effeminacy, slothfulness and destructive luxury; and that the peace of the nations, if it ever comes, will be associated with a terrible deterioration of the race. As to the notion that anything can prevent the abolition of armed conflict as a means of settling the differences of peoples, we may very well be satisfied to await the issue. No one who recognises the steady growth of humanitarian feeling; no one who remembers, even to deplore, our growing sentimentalism; no one who has insight enough to perceive that progress, at an ever-increasing speed, must inevitably be accompanied by advanced intellectuality, increased self-restraint and greater wisdom, can doubt that a process so illogical, barbarous and brutalising as battle must be banished, as well by the new humanity as by the economic necessities of our race. But the notion of deploring, on moral grounds, the assured coming of a reform so salutary, calls for more strenuous reprobation. One would have thought it evident, from the popular effect of the war in South Africa, that, so far from being a matter for self-congratulation, this highly necessary war was a terrible lesson in the brutalising effect of armed conflict, not alone on the men actually engaged, but also on the people who remained at home. Indeed, since it is only a comparatively small fraction of a community that can ever be personally active in military operations, the effect on the home-stayers is evidently what the upholders of war as a civilising influence must be thinking of. It would be ridiculous, and it is quite unnecessary to the argument, to deny the fine qualities of determination, of fortitude before national disaster, and of calm confidence in the prowess of the nation's arms which, in the bulk of the English people, the Transvaal war called forth. It would be just as idle to deny the sublime exhibition of patriotism and self-abnegation which, on one side at least, was provoked by the Russo-Japanese war. But it would also be foolish not to recognise the quite evident brutalisation which has followed our war in South Africa, the remarkable increase in crimes of murderous violence, and especially of double crimes--murder and suicide--which has lately occurred. The true source of these increased evils is the reflex effect of familiarity (either at first hand, or more remotely through newspaper reading and through the personal narrative of returned soldiers) with the notion of violent slaying, and the diminished sense of the sanctity of human life which accompanies the spectacle of man-slaying by wholesale held up to popular admiration, and indeed necessitated and justified by the conditions of war and the duty of