'When we remember this--how frail are the ultimate foundations of our fortress, how much those spiritual elements which alone can give us human society are outnumbered by the pre-human elements--is it surprising that those pre-social promptings of which civilisation represents the conquest, occasionally overwhelm man, break up the solidarity of his army, and push him back a stage or two nearer to the brute condition from which he came? That even at this moment he is groping blindly as to the method of distributing in the order of his most vital needs the wealth he is able to wring from the earth; that some of his most fundamental social and political conceptions--those, among others, with which we are now dealing--have little relation to real facts; that his animosities and hatreds are as purposeless and meaningless as his enthusiasms and his sacrifices; that emotion and effort which quantitatively would suffice amply for the greater tasks before him, for the firmer establishment of justice and well-being, for the cleaning up of all the festering areas of moral savagery that remain, are as a simple matter of fact turned to those purposes hardly at all, but to objects which, to the degree to which they succeed, merely stultify each other? 'Now, this fact, the fact that civilisation is but skin-deep and that man is so largely the unreflecting brute, is not denied by pro-military critics. On the contrary they appeal to it as the first and last justification of their policy. "All your talk will never get over human nature; men are not guided by logic; passion is bound to get the upper hand," and such phrases, are a sort of Greek chorus supplied by the military party to the whole of this discussion. 'Nor do the militarist advocates deny that these unreflecting elements are anti-social; again, it is part of their case that, unless they are held in check by the "iron hand," they will submerge society in a welter of savagery. Nor do they deny--it is hardly possible to do so--that the most important securities which we enjoy, the possibility of living in mutual respect of right because we have achieved some understanding of right; all that distinguishes modern Europe from the Europe of (among other things) religious wars and St. Bartholomew massacres, and distinguishes British political methods from those Turkey or Venezuela, are due to the development of moral forces (since physical force is most resorted to in the less desirable age and area), and particularly to the general recognition that you cannot solve religious and political problems by submitting them to the irrelevant hazard of physical force.