There is a region where words stumble after truth, like children chasing a rainbow across a meadow to find the pot of fairy gold. Multitudinous volumes stuffed with the cant of pacifism and militarism will never explain to us the nature of peace and war. But a few bars of music may sometimes make clear things which all the moralists, and divines, and philosophers--even the poets themselves for the most part, though they come nearer to it at times than the rest--have struggled vainly to show us in their true proportions. The songs of a nation, its national anthems--if they be truly national and not merely some commissioned exercise--are better interpreters than state papers. A man will learn more of the causes of wars, perhaps even of the rights and wrongs of them, by listening to the burst and fall of the French hymn, the ebb and surge of the Russian, in Tschaikovsky's famous overture, than he ever will from books or speeches, argument or oratory. [Sidenote: IMPOTENCE OF LOGIC] Yet there are people who think it not impossible to prove to mankind by logical processes, that the loss which any great nation must inevitably sustain through war, will far outweigh any advantages which {7} can ensue from it, even if the arms of the conqueror were crowned with victories greater than those of Caesar or Napoleon. They draw us pictures of the exhaustion which must inevitably follow upon such a struggle conducted upon the modern scale, of the stupendous loss of capital, destruction of credit, paralysis of industry, arrest of progress in things spiritual as well as temporal, the shock to civilisation, and the crippling for a generation, probably for several generations, possibly for ever, of the victorious country in its race with rivals who have wisely stood aside from the fray. These arguments may conceivably be true, may in no particular be over-coloured, or an under-valuation, either of the good which has been attained by battle, or of the evils which have been escaped. But they would be difficult to establish even before an unbiassed court, and they are infinitely more difficult to stamp upon popular belief. It is not sufficient either with statesmen or peoples to set before them a chain of reasoning which is logically unanswerable. Somehow or other the new faith which it is desired to implant, must be rendered independent of logic and unassailable by logic. It must rise into a higher order of convictions than the intellectual before it can begin to operate upon human affairs. For it is matched against opinions which have been held and acted upon so long, that they have become unquestionable save in purely academic discussions. At those decisive moments, when action follows upon thought like a flash, conclusions which depend upon a train of reasoning are of no account: instinct will always get the better of any syllogism. {8}