His most prominent utterance is his lecture on “War” delivered to the students at the Engineering College at Woolwich in 1865 and printed in _The Crown of Wild Olive_. It appears, throughout, to be in praise of war. But we shall see that great deductions are to be made. Nevertheless it begins appallingly enough by stating that all fine arts have been founded in war, and can only be practised by warlike nations. He gives as instances, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The instances are all fallacious, particularly those of the peace-loving people in the Nile Valley, and the very inartistic Romans. Nor is there any proof that war either caused or aided the artistic faculty of the Greeks. How can there be? The characteristic warrior city--Sparta--was as inartistic as Woolwich. He goes a step further to please his audience of young warrior-students by the strange assertion that “war is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men”: and that, in History, we find coupled together “peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness--peace and death.” “I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war: that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace; in a word that they were born in war, and expired in peace.”[99] Such is the rash and partial generalization of the rhetorician, based on this much of historic truth that the early years of a nation’s life have often been occupied in conflict for safety or empire, and its later, more peaceful and more prosperous years are marked sometimes by the weakening influences of wealth, and end in decay. But it is hard, indeed, impossible I venture to say, to show that the motives or the methods of war are not, from beginning to end, retrograde and barbaric, a harking back to the life of the beast; and not the source of any of these good things named. But now comes the antidote; after such an exordium, what manner of peace address might he not give to those Woolwich men and they listen? First he excepts from his approval “the rage of a barbarian wolf flock,” and the “habitual restlessness or rapine of mountaineers,” and “the occasional struggle of a strong, peaceful nation for its life"--a strange exception that--and the “contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power"--a wide exception that. It leaves him three kinds of beneficial war: war for exercise or play, out of mere high spirits and unused energies of the upper classes--war for aggression against surrounding evil--and wars for defence of noble institutions and pure households.