We have fed our sea for a thousand years, And she calls us, still unfed, Though there's never a wave of all her waves But marks our English dead. We have strawed our best to the weed's unrest, To the shark and the sheering gull, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha' paid in full. Aggressive patriotism is thus condemned by common sense and the verdict of history no less than by morality. We are entitled to say to the militarists what Socrates said to Polus: This doctrine of yours has now been examined and found wanting. And this doctrine alone has stood the test--that we ought to be more afraid of doing than of suffering wrong; and that the prime business of every man [and nation] is not to seem good, but to be good, in all private and public dealings. If the nations would render something more than lip-service to this principle, the abolition of war would be within sight; for, as Ruskin says, echoing the judgment of the Epistle of St. James, 'The first reason for all wars, and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European countries, are thieves.' But it must be remembered that, in spite of the proverb, it takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion. Our own conversion to pacificism, though sincere, is somewhat recent. Our literature does not reflect it. Bacon is frankly militarist: Above all, for empire and greatness, it importeth most, that a nation do profess arms, as their principal honour, study, and occupation. For the things which we formerly have spoken of are but habilitations towards arms; and what is habitation without intention and act?... It is so plain that a man profiteth in that he most intendeth, that it needeth not to be stood upon. It is enough to point at it; that no nation, which doth not directly profess arms, may look to have greatness fall into their mouths. A state, therefore, 'ought to have those laws or customs, which may reach forth unto them just occasions of war.' Shakespeare's 'Henry V' has been not unreasonably recommended by the Germans as 'good war-reading.' It would be easy to compile a _catena_ of bellicose maxims from our literature, reaching down to the end of the 19th century. The change is perhaps due less to progress in morality than to that political good sense which has again and again steered our ship through dangerous rocks. But there has been some real advance, in all civilised countries. We do not find that men talked about the 'bankruptcy of Christianity' during the Napoleonic campaigns. Even the Germans think it necessary to tell each other that it was Belgium who began this war.