One great obstacle to the discontinuance of bloodshed is the incorrigible sentimentality with which war has always been regarded by mankind. “Who was it,” exclaimed the poet Tibullus, “that first invented the dreadful sword? How savage, how truly steel-hearted was he!” But surely the reproach is less deserved by the early barbarian who had the ingenuity to discover an improved method of destruction than by the so-called civilized persons who, for the sake of lucre, prolong such inventions long after the date when they should have been abandoned. “War is hell,” men say, and continue to accept it as inevitable. But if war is hell, who but men themselves are the fiends that people it? In like manner the outbreak of war is often called “a relapse into barbarism,” but rather it is a proof that we have never emerged from barbarism at all; and the knowledge of that fact is the only rational solace that can be found, when we see the chief nations of Europe flying at each other’s throats. For if this were a civilized age, the prospect would be without hope; but seeing that we are not civilized--that as yet we have only distant glimpses of civilization--we can still have faith in the future. For the present, looking at the hideous lessons of the war, we must admit that the growth of a humaner sentiment has been indefinitely retarded. We cannot advance at the same time on the path of militarism and of humaneness: we shall have to make up our minds, when the fit of savagery has spent itself, which of the two diverging paths we are to follow. And the moral of the war for social reformers will perhaps be this: that it is not sufficient to condemn the barbarities of warfare alone, as our pacifists have too often done. The civilized spirit can only be developed by a consistent protest against all forms of cruelty and oppression; it is only by cultivating a whole-minded reverence for the rights of all our fellow-beings that we shall rid ourselves of that inheritance of selfish callousness of which the militarist and imperialist mania is a part.[44] Is it not time that we sent the Cave-Man back to his den--henceforth to be his sepulchre--and buried for ever that infernal spirit of Hatred which he brought with him from the pit? XVI POETRY OF DEATH AND LOVE And Death and Love are yet contending for their prey. SHELLEY. To look back over a long stretch of years, or to re-read the annals of a Society with which one has been closely associated, is to be reminded of the loss of many cherished comrades and friends. During the past decade, especially, there are few households that have not become more intimately associated with Death; but even in this matter, it would seem, the war, far from “making men think,” has thrown them back more and more on the ancient substitutes for thought, and on consolations which only console when they are quite uncritically accepted.