You will probably try, and almost certainly fail, to make them somehow feel ashamed. It is likely enough that they will instead become great national heroes. "'And after all, this is supposed to be a war in which one party is wrong and the other right, and the right wins. Suppose both are wrong; or suppose the wrong party wins? It is as likely as not; for, if the right party is helped by his good conscience, the wrong has probably taken pains to have the odds on his side before he began quarreling. In that case, all the wild waste of blood and treasure, all the suffering of innocent people and dumb animals, all the tears of women and children have not set up the right, but established the wrong. To do a little evil that great or certain good may come is all very well; but to do great evil for only a chance of getting something which half the people may think good and the other half think bad ... that is neither good morals nor good sense. Anybody not in a passion must see that it is insanity,' So they say who think war always wrong. "Their argument is wrong. It is judging war as a profit-and-loss account. It leaves out of sight the fact that in some causes it is better to fight and be broken than to yield peacefully; that sometimes the mere act of resisting to the death is in itself a victory. "Let us try to understand this. The Greeks who fought and died at Thermopylæ had no doubt that they were doing right to fight and die, and we all agree with them. They probably knew they would be defeated. They probably expected that, after their defeat, the Persians would easily conquer the rest of Greece, and would treat it much more harshly because it had resisted. But such thoughts did not affect them. They would not consent to their country's dishonor. "Take again a very clear modern case: the fine story of the French tourist who was captured, together with a priest and some other white people, by Moorish robbers. The Moors gave their prisoners the choice either to trample on the Cross or to be killed. The Frenchman was not a Christian. He disliked Christianity. But he was not going to trample on the Cross at the orders of a robber. He stuck to his companions and died with them. "Honor and dishonor are real things. I will not try to define them; but will only notice that, like religion, they admit no bargaining. Indeed, we can almost think of honor as being simply that which a free man values more than life, and dishonor as that which he avoids more than suffering or death. And the important point for us is that there are such things as honor and dishonor. "There are some people, followers of Tolstoy, who accept this as far as dying is concerned, but will have nothing to do with killing. Passive resistance, they say, is right; martyrdom is right; but to resist violence by violence is sin.