What _do_ these phrases mean? These, and many like them, are repeated in a knowing way with an air of great wisdom and profundity by journalists and writers of repute, and one may find them blatant any day in our newspapers and reviews; yet the most cursory examination proves them to be neither wise nor profound, but simply parrot-like catch-phrases which lack common sense, and fly in the face of facts of everyday experience. The truth is that the facts of the world as they stare us in the face show that, in our common attitude, we not only overlook the modifications in human nature, which have occurred historically since yesterday--occurred even in our generation--but we also ignore the modification of human nature which mere differences of social habit and custom and outlook effect. Take the case of the duel. Even educated people in Germany, France, and Italy, will tell you that it is "not in human nature" to expect a man of gentle birth to abandon the habit of the duel; the notion that honorable people should ever so place their honor at the mercy of whoever may care to insult them is, they assure you, both childish and sordid. With them the matter will not bear discussion. Yet the great societies which exist in England, North America, Australia--the whole Anglo-Saxon world, in fact--have abandoned the duel, and we cannot lump the whole Anglo-Saxon race as either sordid or childish. That such a change as this, which must have conflicted with human pugnacity in its most insidious form,--pride and personal vanity, the traditions of an aristocratic status, every one of the psychological factors now involved in international conflict--has been effected in our own generation should surely give pause to those who dismiss as chimerical any hope that rationalism will ever dominate the conduct of nations. Discussing the impossibility of allowing arbitration to cover all causes of difference, Mr. Roosevelt remarked, in justification of large armaments: "We despise a nation, just as we despise a man, who fails to resent an insult."[56] Mr. Roosevelt seems to forget that the duel with us is extinct. Do _we_, the English-speaking people of the world, to whom presumably Mr. Roosevelt must have been referring, despise a man who fails to resent an insult by arms? Would we not, on the contrary, despise the man who should do so? Yet so recent is this charge that it has not yet reached the majority of Europeans.