Lord Roberts is quoted as saying, just before his death, that war is necessary and salutary, and that it is the only national tonic that can be prescribed when peace begets degeneracy in an over-civilized people. He looked upon Germany as the greatest friend of the Allies when she declared war against them. But could there be any better proof that peace had not begotten degeneracy in England or France or Russia than the promptness with which these countries took up the challenge of Prussian militarism, and the fortitude and self-denial with which they gave it blow for blow? Under the smiling face of peace, when the demand is made, the heroic element is always found to be slumbering. Every day, in the industrial and scientific fields, men prove themselves the same heroes that they do on the field of battle, and they prove it without the excitement and stimulus that war gives; and women prove it in times of peace and times of war. The gospel of war as a national tonic in our time is a delusion and a snare. Are we to get up a war offhand because we think the nations need that kind of medicine? Blood-letting is a strange remedy for the depleted condition to which Lord Roberts refers. War sets up the victorious nation, but how about the defeated one? Have the defeats of Spain in the past two or three hundred years set her up? Have the defeats of Turkey redounded to her glory and power? Little doubt that this World War will bear fruit, but it will be a kind of fruit the combatant did not seek or expect. The conclusion, then, that I arrive at is that a new rule of conduct for nations as for individuals, a new biological law, has come into being through man’s moral nature, his sense of right and wrong. There is no question of right or of wrong in the world of living things below man, and we can persuade ourselves that there is only by putting ourselves in the place of the struggling animal forces. And there is no question of right and of wrong in the human world till man’s consciousness of this difference has begun to dawn. In our day this consciousness is sufficiently developed to become the ruling factor in the conduct of national and international affairs, and must very soon put an end to all armed human conflicts. In saying this I am not exploiting a theory; I am trying to state an indisputable scientific fact. X TOOTH AND CLAW I To deny that Nature is cruel, in the strict sense of the term, were, to the majority of persons, like denying that blood is red, or that fire will burn. We use the term “cruel” loosely, and interpret the ways of Nature in terms of our own psychology.