The reasoning, then, which contains the key that is alone capable of closing permanently the portals of Janus is this: that there exists a distinction between a just and an unjust war, between a good and a bad cause, and that no man has a right either to take part knowingly and wilfully in a cause he believes to be unjust, nor to commit himself servilely to a theory of duty which deprives him, at the very outset, of his inalienable human birthright of free thought and free will. This is the principle of personal responsibility which has long since won admission everywhere save in the service of Mars, and which requires but to be extended there to free the world from the custom that has longest and most ruinously afflicted it. For it attacks that custom where it has never yet been seriously attacked before, at its real source--namely, in the heart, the brain, and the conscience, that, in spite of all warping and training, still belong to the individual units who alone make it possible. It behoves all of us, therefore, who are interested in abolishing military barbarism, not merely to yield a passive assent to it ourselves, but to claim for it assent and assertion from others. We must ask and reask the question: What is the title by which a man, through the mere fact of his military cloth, claims exemption from the moral law that is universally binding upon his fellows? For this principle of individual military responsibility is of such power, that if carried to its consequences, it must ultimately prove fatal to militarism; and if it has not yet the prescription of time and common opinion in its favour, it is sealed nevertheless with the authority of many of the best intellects that have helped to enlighten the past, and is indissolubly contained in the teaching alike of our religious as of our moral code. It can, in fact, only be gainsaid by a denial of the fundamental maxims of those two guides of our conduct, and for that reason stands absolutely proof against the assaults of argument. Try to reconcile with the ordinary conceptions of the duties of a man or a Christian the duty of doing what his conscience condemns, and it may be safely predicted that you will try in vain. The considerations that may occur of utility and expediency beat in vain against the far greater expediency of a world at peace, freed from the curse of the warrior’s destructiveness; nor can the whole armoury of military logic supply a single counter-argument which does not resolve itself into an argument of supposed expediency, and which may not therefore be effectually parried, even on this narrower debating ground, by the consideration of the overwhelming advantages which could not but flow from the universal acceptance of the contrary and higher principle--the principle that for a soldier, as for anyone else, his first duty is to his conscience.