But “_this_ war was justifiable.” In every nation the belief prevails that, though war in general is to be deprecated, any particular contest in which they may be engaged is righteous, inevitable, one of pure self-defence, in their own words, “forced on us.” Even if this were true, in some instances, in bygone years when international relations were less complex, and when it was possible for two countries to quarrel and “fight it out,” like schoolboys, without inflicting any widespread injury upon others, it is wholly different now; for the calamity caused by a modern war is so great that it hardly matters, to the world at large, who, in schoolboy phrase, “began it.” It takes two to make a quarrel; and the two are jointly responsible for the disaster that their quarrel entails upon mankind. The more one looks into these fallacies about fighting--and their number is legion--one is compelled to believe that the spirit which chiefly underlies the tendencies to war, apart from the direct incentive of commercial greed, is one of Fear. Hatred is more obvious, but it is fear which is at the bottom of the hatred. This alone can account for the extraordinary shortsightedness with which all freedom, both of speech and of action, is trampled on, when a war is once commenced. In such circumstances, society at once reverts, in its panic alarm for its own safety, to what may be called the Ethics of the Pack. Of all the absurd charges levelled against those objectors to military service who refused to sacrifice their own principles to other persons’ ideas of patriotism, the quaintest was that of “cowardice”; for, with all respect to the very real physical bravery of those who fought, it must be said that the highest courage shown during the war was that of the persons who were denounced and ridiculed as cravens. It was a moment when it required much more boldness to object than to consent; one of those crises to which the famous lines of Marvell are applicable: When the sword glitters o’er the judge’s head, And fear has coward churchmen silencéd, Then is the poet’s time; ’tis then he draws, And single fights forsaken virtue’s cause. The despised “Conchie” was, in truth, the hero and poet of the occasion. Again, it must be owing to fear, above all other impulses, that when a war is over, the conquerors, instead of offering generous terms--a course which would be at least as much to their own advantage as to that of the vanquished--enforce hard and ruinous conditions which rob them of a permanent peace. This they do from what Leigh Hunt calls The consciousness of strength in enemies, Who must be strain’d upon, or else they rise. It was this that caused the Germans, fifty years ago, to dictate at Paris those shameful terms which have now been their own undoing; and it was this which caused the French, in their hour of victory, to imitate the worst blunders of their enemies.