Biological considerations would seem to suggest that these generalizations contain a large element of inexactitude. The doctrine of pacifism is {126} a perfectly natural development, and ultimately inevitable in an animal having an unlimited appetite for experience and an indestructible inheritance of social instinct. Like all moral discoveries made in the haphazard, one-sided way which the lack of co-ordination in human society forces upon its moral pioneers, it has necessarily an appearance of crankiness, of sentimentality, of an inaptitude for the grasp of reality. This is normal and does not in the least affect the value of the truth it contains. Legal and religious torture were doubtless first attacked by cranks; slavery was abolished by them. Advocacy by such types does not therefore constitute an argument of any weight against their doctrines, which can adequately be judged only by some purely objective standard. Judged by such a standard, pacifism, as we have seen, appears to be a natural development, and is directed towards a goal which unless man’s nature undergoes a radical change will probably be attained. That its attainment has so far been foreseen only by a class of men possessing more than the usual impracticability of the minor prophet is hardly to be considered a relevant fact. * * * * * It is impossible to leave this subject without some comment on the famous doctrine that war is a biological necessity. Even if one knew nothing of those who have enunciated this proposition, its character would enable one to suspect it of being the utterance of a soldier rather than a biologist. There is about it a confidence that the vital effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, {127} where facts are the masters of all. It may be supposed that even in the country of its birth the doctrine seemed more transcendently true in times of peace amid a proud and brilliant regime than it does now after more than twelve months of war. The whole conception is of a type to arouse interest in its psychological origin rather than in a serious discussion of its merits. It arose in a military State abounding in prosperity and progress of very recent growth, and based upon three short wars which had come closely one after another and formed an ascending series of brilliant success. In such circumstances even grosser assumptions might very well flourish and some such doctrine was a perfectly natural product. The situation of the warrior-biologist was in some way that of the orthodox expounder of ethics or political economy—his conclusions were ready-made for him; all he had to do was to find the “reasons” for them. War and war only had produced the best