But there always has been—there always will be—war. It is inevitable; it is a part of the condition of human society. Man has always made glory to himself from the destruction of his fellow; so it will continue. It may be very pitiable; would it were otherwise! But so it is, and there is no helping it. Happily we are slowly killing this destructive fallacy. A long breathing time of peace has been fatal to the dread magnificence of glory. Science and philosophy—_povera e nuda filosofia!_—have made good their claims, inducing man to believe that he may vindicate the divinity of his nature otherwise than by perpetrating destruction. He begins to think there is a better glory in the communication of triumphs of the mind, than in the clash of steel and the roar of artillery. At the present moment a society, embracing men of distant nations—“natural enemies,” as the old wicked cant of the old patriotism had it—is at work plucking the plumes from Glory, unbracing his armour, and divesting the ogre of all that dazzled foolish and unthinking men, showing the rascal in his natural hideousness, in all his base deformity. Some, too, are calculating the cost of Glory’s table: some showing what an appetite the demon has, devouring at a meal the substance of these thousand sons of industry—yea, eating up the wealth of kingdoms. And thus by degrees are men beginning to look upon this god Glory as no more than a finely-trapped Sawney Bean—a monster and a destroyer—a nuisance—a noisy lie. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] THE GREENWICH PENSIONER A GREENWICH pensioner! Did any of my readers ever ponder on that strange composition of battered humanity and blue serge? Did they never feel a something approaching very near gratitude on passing, in the metropolis, a Greenwich pensioner, who, with his honest, carved out, unabashed front, looks as bluntly and as wonderingly at the bustle and splendour around him as does an unsophisticated wether suddenly removed from South Downs to Cheapside, whilst shaking his woollen coat beneath the whip of the coachman to the Lord Mayor. What a mixture of gravity and wonderment is in the poor brute’s countenance! how with its meek, uplifted head it stares at the effulgent vehicle,—runs leaping at the coach-wheels, mistaking them for hurdles,—falls, awe-struck, back, at the gilt and beavered greatness of the footman’s cocked hat,—then, suddenly awakened from its amazement by the lurcher’s teeth, or the driver’s stick, makes an unlucky spring of some three feet into the air, catches a glance of its figure in the mirrored walls of a silk mercer, and, startled at the sight, dashes through the first court,—carrying perhaps a few yards upon its back some red-faced, nankeen-gaitered little stockbroker, whose spattered small clothes are for a time unregarded in the mighty rush of drovers, butchers, dogs, and idlers.