This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that the qualities which we associate with war, and nothing else but war, are necessary to assure a nation success in its struggles with other nations is equivalent to saying that those who drift away from war will go down before those whose warlike activity can conserve those qualities essential to survival; and this is but another way of saying that men must always remain warlike if they are to survive, that the warlike nations inherit the earth; that men's pugnacity, therefore, is the outcome of the great natural law of survival, and that a decline of pugnacity marks in any nation a retrogression and not an advance in its struggle for survival. I have already indicated (Chapter II., Part II.) the outlines of the proposition, which leaves no escape from this conclusion. This is the scientific basis of the proposition voiced by the authorities I have quoted--Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, Nietzsche, and various of the warlike clergy[68]--and it lies at the very bottom of the plea that man's nature, in so far as it touches the tendency of men as a whole to go to war, does not change; that the warlike qualities are a necessary part of human vitality in the struggle for existence; that, in short, all that we know of the law of evolution forbids the conclusion that man will ever lose this warlike pugnacity, or that nations will survive other than by the struggle of physical force. The view is best voiced, perhaps, by Homer Lea, whom I have already quoted. He says, in his "Valor of Ignorance": As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor constitutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws, constitutions are but temporary effulgences [P. 11]. The deterioration of the military force and the consequent destruction of the militant spirit have been concurrent with national decay [P. 24]. International disagreements are ... the result of the primordial conditions that sooner or later cause war ... the law of struggle, the law of survival, universal, unalterable ... to thwart them, to short-cut them, to circumvent them, to cozen, to deny, to scorn, to violate them, is folly such as man's conceit alone makes possible.... Arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws ... that govern the existence of political entities [Pp. 76, 77]. Laws that govern the militancy of a people are not of man's framing, but follow the primitive ordinances of nature that govern all forms of life, from simple protozoa, awash in the sea, to the empires of man.[69]