At the same time, however, these same classes and persons who thus in various important spheres of activity adopt the lower standard of war ethics, in all other domains and relationships--in the family, in the Church, and in social intercourse--act in accordance with the higher moral code. The result is a loose synthesis of the two systems, the establishment of a sort of bi-moral code made up of rules and practices mutually inconsistent and irreconcilable. The moral damage resulting from such moral confusion is beyond estimate. It is the inconsistencies and hypocrisies involved in such a bi-moral code that is one ground of Nietzsche’s bitter attack on the ethics of Christendom. Yet, as Professor Figgis says, “Nietzsche deserves the gratitude of all friends of humanity for the service he has done in ... showing that the whole sphere of private life cannot in the long run be different from the ideals accepted in public affairs.”[786] [Sidenote: Obsolescence of war as a school of morals: the war system an anachronism in modern civilization] The arraignment of the war system by the awakening conscience of the civilized world has led its advocates to lay the stress of their argument on the moral uses of war. They eulogize war as the nurse of the sturdy, heroic virtues, and hence as an indispensable agency in the moral education of the race. War has, it is true, in past ages been “the supreme theater of human strenuousness,” and it may be true, as is assumed by Professor William James in his _Moral Equivalent of War_, that the qualities of courage, fortitude, and self-devotion to common interests were in the beginning evoked and fostered in the race by war; but whatever may have been the moral uses of war in the past stages of human development, the time is past when the war system can serve the highest ends of civilization. It is an anachronism in the modern world. It has become a drag upon the moral progress of the race. By an ethical necessity the day of its abolition approaches. At a time not remote, as history reckons time, the common conscience of the world will brand war between civilized nations as the greatest of crimes, and will regard the nation that assaults another with intent to commit general slaughter as a criminal nation--as a common enemy of the human race. In that coming and better age men will look with the same incredulous amazement upon our infernal engines and devices for wholesale man-killing that we of this age look upon “the iron virgin of Nuremberg” and the other medieval instruments of torture in the museums of Europe.