There can be no doubt that we are braver than the ancients. Our control of fire has obliged us to be continually making calls upon our bravery. The formidable machines which we set in motion; the explosives which we use so largely; the murderous forces of nature, like electricity, which we have brought into subservience; the thousand dangerous exploits on the sea, in the bowels of the earth, and in the giddy heights of the air in which thousands, nay millions, of engineers and workmen daily risk their lives, have steeled our temperaments to quell that blind and instinctive fear which lies deep down in human nature. War is the supreme test of this increased courage. War has become rarer, it is true, than it was in the ancient world; but how much more terrible and awe-inspiring has it become, both by land and by sea, since fire replaced steel as the principal weapon! The only forms of fire known to the ancients as useful in war were boiling oil, which was often used in sieges, and the so-called Greek fire, which was employed in naval battles—a mysterious compound, into which one suspects, petroleum entered, for it was much used by the nations and cities of the Black Sea. But both of these were but children’s toys compared with the guns, shrapnel, and torpedoes of modern warfare. We are justified, therefore, in asserting that the men who took part in the battles of Marathon, Cannæ, and Zama did not need to have hearts so stout or courage so intrepid as the men who faced each other in the great battles of the Napoleonic era, in the American Civil War, in the battles between the Russians and Japanese, or in the recent Balkan War. But if we are more courageous, we are at the same time less cruel, a fact which throws our superior courage into greater relief. One of the characteristic differences between contemporary civilisation and those which preceded it, up to the French Revolution, is the total suppression of the bloody spectacles which, under so many aspects and forms, were one of the most sinister delights of our ancestors. We find the greatest difficulty in understanding how so highly civilised a people as the Romans, with so many thoughts and feelings in common with ourselves, could have been roused to such a pitch of intoxication by the games of gladiators and the baiting of wild beasts. And yet the popular passion for these bloody games was such that even the emperors, in whom they inspired feelings of horror and repulsion, like Augustus, were compelled to attend the gory spectacles, so as not to appear, by their absence, to rebuke those who supported them and to run counter to the absorbing passion of the masses for them.