"Antisthenes hated war so much that he attacked the greatest and least doubted military glory of the Athenians, their victories over the Persians. He attacked it with serious arguments, he sneered at it, he tried to reduce it to a mere sham. Did Antisthenes not say, that the victory of the Athenians over the Persians at Salamis would have been something admirable, had the Persians excelled the Athenians in point of virtue and capability? For in that case the Athenians would have proved even more virtuous and more capable. However, the Persians, Antisthenes elaborately proves, were altogether inferior. Nor did they have a true king, Xerxes being a mere sham king with a high and richly jewelled cap on his head, sitting on a golden throne, like a doll. Had Xerxes not to whip his soldiers into battle? What, then, is the glory of the Athenians? None! Salamis, like all battles, was a mere butchery, and soldiers are mere cowards, beating inferiors and running away from superiors. So far Antisthenes. "The Britannic version of Antisthenes' sally against war, soldiers, and the whole of the military spirit, I found comical in the extreme. 'Well done' I repeatedly exclaimed within myself, when I saw the old capers of the Cynics of my mortal time brought up again for the consumption of people who had never heard of Cynics. That man Shaw out-Cynics many a Cynic. He brings upon the stage a number of persons, each of whom is, in turn, a good soul first, and then a viper; an enthusiast, and then a liar; a virtue, and then vice itself. "Take the girl Raina. She begins by being ideal and enthusiastic; ideal, because she is pure, young, and in love with her own _fiancé_; enthusiastic, because she is in raptures over the military glory of her _fiancé_, as would be in all truth and reality a hundred out of each hundred girls in most countries of the sub-Shavian world. Not the slightest inkling or fact is indicated that she is not pure, ideal, or genuinely enthusiastic. In the next scene she is suddenly made out to be a vicious girl, a coldly calculating minx, and we are given to understand that she has had no end of general and particular adventures behind her, as she hopes to have a good many in front of her. "Why? Why are we now to assume or believe that Raina of yesterday is not Raina of to-day? Where is the motive, I asked myself with grim satisfaction with the brave Cynicism of the author. Why? Simply, for nothing. The comedy as such does not require it; no fact alleged to have happened, substantiates it; no situation growing out of the piece makes it a dramatic necessity. It is done simply and exclusively, in true Cynic fashion, for the sake of ridiculing a person that began by being enthusiastic for War.