From days immemorial the Queen of Weapons, a creator as well as a destroyer, ‘carved out history, formed the nations, and shaped the world.’ She decided the Alexandrine and the Cæsarian victories which opened new prospects to human ken. She diffused everywhere the bright lights and splendid benefits of war and conquest, whose functions are all important in the formative and progressive processes. It is no paradox to assert _La guerre a enfanté le droit_: without War there would be no Right. The cost of life, says Emerson, the dreary havoc of comfort and time, are overpaid by the vistas it opens of Eternal Law reconstructing and uplifting society; it breaks up the old horizon, and we see through the rifts a wider view. War, again, benefits society by raising its tone above the ineffable littleness and meanness which characterise the every-day life of the many. In the presence of the Great Destroyer, petty feuds and miserable envy, hatred, and malice stand hushed and awe-struck. Very hollow in these days sounds Voltaire’s banter on War when he says that a king picks up a parcel of men who have nothing to do, dresses them in blue cloth at two shillings a yard, binds their hats with coarse white worsted, turns them to the right and left, and marches them away to glory. The Sword and only the Sword raised the worthier race to power upon the ruins of impotent savagery; and she carried in her train, from time immemorial, throughout the civilised world, Asiatic Africa, Asia, and Europe, the arts and the sciences which humanise mankind. In fact, whatever apparent evil the Sword may have done, she worked for the highest ultimate good. With the Arabs the Sword was a type of individuality. Thus Shanfara, the fleet-foot, sings in his _Lamiyyah_, (L-poem):— Three friends: the Heart no fear shall know, The sharp white Sword, the yellow Bow. Zayd bin Ali boasts, like El-Mutanabbi:— The wielded Sword-blade knows my hand, The Spear obeys my lusty arm. And Ziyád El-Ajam thus writes the epitaph of El-Mughayrah: ‘So died he, after having sought death between the spear-point and the Sword-edge.’ This ‘Pundonor’ presently extended westward. During the knightly ages the ‘good Sword’ of the Paladin and the Chevalier embodied a new faith—the Religion of Honour, the first step towards the religion of humanity. These men once more taught the sublime truth, the splendid doctrine known to the Stoics and the Pharisees, but unaccountably neglected in later creeds:— Do good, for Good is good to do.