But although the whole of this is true, it does not lighten the guilt of the deliberate peace-breaker. Many of the same benefits, though in a lesser degree, arise out of a pestilence, a famine, or any other great national calamity; and it is the acknowledged duty of man to strive to the uttermost against these and to ward them off with all his strength. It is the same with war. To argue, as German intellectuals have done of late, that in order to expand their territories they were justified in scattering infection and deliberately inviting this plague, that the plague itself was a thing greatly for the advantage of the moral sanitation of the world--all this is merely the casuistry of a priesthood whom the vanity of rubbing elbows with men of action has beguiled of their salvation. [Sidenote: THE ARROGANCE OF PEDANTS] Somewhere in one of his essays Emerson introduces an interlocutor whom he salutes as 'little Sir.' One feels tempted to personify the whole corporation of German pedants under the same title. When they {177} talk so vehemently and pompously about the duty of deliberate war-making for the expansion of the Fatherland, for the fulfilment of the theory of evolution, even for the glory of God on high, our minds are filled with wonder and a kind of pity. Have they ever seen war except in their dreams, or a countryside in devastation? Have they ever looked with their own eyes on shattered limbs, or faces defaced, of which cases, and the like, there are already some hundreds of thousands in the hospitals of Europe, and may be some millions before this war is ended? Have they ever reckoned--except in columns of numerals without human meaning--how many more hundreds of thousands, in the flower of their age, have died and will die, or--more to be pitied--will linger on maimed and impotent when the war is ended? Have they realised any of these things, except in diagrams, and curves, and statistical tables, dealing with the matter--as they would say themselves, in their own dull and dry fashion--'under its broader aspects'--in terms, that is, of population, food-supply, and economic output? Death, and suffering of many sorts occur in all wars--even in the most humane war. And this is not a humane war which the pedants have let loose upon us. Indeed, they have taught with some emphasis that humanity, under such conditions, is altogether a mistake. "Sentimentality!" cries the 'little Sir' impatiently, "sickly sentimentality! In a world of men such things must be. God has ordained war." Possibly. But what one feels is that the making of war is the Lord's own business and not the 'little Sir's.' It is the Lord's, as vengeance is, and {178} earthquakes, floods, and droughts; not an office to be undertaken by mortals.