I. As to wars for pastime, we find that they are to be fought somewhat in the manner of duels or tournaments by the officers; by the idle young men who are too proud for peaceful business, and whose arms and legs want play. There is to be no gathering of peasants to fire into one another; and Carlyle on the thirty peasants from Dumdrudge is helpfully quoted, from _Sartor Resartus_. The man who could quote that to Woolwich students could do most things with an audience. We next have a little paragraph thrown in on Arbitration. “Grant,” he says sarcastically, “that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them; and that, while questions of a few acres and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of Kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle.”[100] I doubt if any one has ever had the ear of that audience of thoughtless aspiring soldier students to an Arbitration argument, before or since. He proceeds to wash his hands wholly of modern war. “If you have to take masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by the labour of others,--to provide them with destructive machines varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack--to destroy, for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities and its harbours; and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work--what book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?”[101] Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address. II. We pass next to wars of aggression against evil--and the lecturer spends powerful pages on the selfishness and faithlessness of ambitious warlike kings; on the common degradation of the idea of power; and on the need for concentrating all our energies on home reforms. We are warned against supposing that a big nation is a strong one, bade to aim at union of hearts rather. “Only that nation gains true territory which gains itself.” “A nation,” he proceeds, “does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit.” “Whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting.”[102]