When the tale of twentieth century satire shall be told, considerable space will have to be devoted to Militarism versus Pacifism. But the Victorians lived, if not in piping times of peace, at least in a time reasonably peaceful, for their island heard little but echoes of the European cannon; a condition which tended to keep men’s minds at home and occupied with internal affairs. The satirists therefore have little to say about war. Peacock unveils the policy of launching a foreign war in order to smother discontent over domestic troubles. In such stories as _Shirley_, _Silas Marner_, and others located in or soon after the Napoleonic Era, are scattered parenthetical remarks; as for instance the opening scene of _An Amazing Marriage_, “when crowned heads were running over Europe, crying out for charity’s sake to be amused after their tiresome work of slaughter; and you know what a dread they have of moping.” In Disraeli’s _Ixion_, Mars is not popular in Olympian circles, being despised as “a brute, more a bully than a hero. Not at all in the best set.” Accordingly, since, as we are reminded by Phillips in his _Modern Europe_, “the British lion, turned ruminant, had been browsing in the pleasant pastures of peace to the melodious piping of Bright and Cobden,” and since it had, when required, the less melodious taunting of Carlyle, it needed at this time no Aristophanes or Swift to mock at the madness of militarism. In organized religion we see a paradoxical and yet natural enough operation of mortal psychology. In its primitive origin it sprang from two opposite sources, human innocence and human craft. In his innocence man believed that his immortal life must put on mortality, become incarnate in architecture, creed, ritual, before it could be lived. And in his craft he discovered that the incorruptible could be made to put on corruption,--to the great advantage of an entirely terrestrial ambition. These two factors, conjoined with the ubiquitous impulse to socialize feelings and thoughts as well as actions, have succeeded in so clothing and housing the wistful spirit which for itself asks no more than an assurance of some divinity dwelling without or within us, that its elaborate trappings and conspicuous paraphernalia have become shining marks for those who see the possible absurdity in this materializing of the spiritual. Until recently, however, few shafts have penetrated to the heart of the discrepancy. Most of them have been aimed at the broad and inviting surface of obvious inconsistencies: indulgence in material luxury on the part of an institution founded to further the spiritual life; dominance of authority in a realm that should be free; flourishing of bigotry, greed, cruelty, hypocrisy, in the exclusive garden of all the virtues; unlovely partisan disputes and recriminations in connection with the one thing that best can symbolize the brotherhood of man.