It may be, said that the example of Descartes proves and indicates nothing; and we may feel pretty sure that his scruples seemed extravagantly absurd to his contemporaries, if he suffered them to know them. Nevertheless, he might have appealed to several well-known historical facts as a reason against too hasty a condemnation of his apparent super-sensitiveness. He might have argued that the profession of a pirate once reflected no more moral discredit than that of a soldier did in his days; that the pirate’s reply to Alexander, that he infested the seas by the same right wherewith the conqueror devastated the land, conveyed a moral sentiment once generally accepted, nor even then quite extinct; that in the days of Homer it was as natural to ask a seafarer whether he were a freebooter as whether he were a merchant; that so late in Greek history as the time of Thucydides, several tribes on the mainland of Greece still gloried in piracy, and accounted their plunder honourably won; and that at Rome the Cilician pirates, whom it devolved on Pompey to disperse, were joined by persons of wealth, birth, and education, ‘as if,’ says Plutarch, ‘their employment were worthy of the ambition of men of honour.’ Remembering, therefore, these things, and the fact that not so very many centuries ago public opinion was so lenient to the practice of bishops and ecclesiastics taking an active part in warfare that they commonly did so in spite of canons and councils to the contrary, it is a fair subject for speculation whether the moral opinion of the future may not come to coincide with the feeling of Descartes, and it behoves us to keep our minds alive to possibilities of change in this matter, already it would seem in process of formation. Who will venture to predict what may be the effect of the rise of the general level of education, and of the higher moral life of our time, on the popular judgment of even fifty years hence regarding a voluntarily adopted military life?