The struggle for life goes on, but the form of it changes unceasingly; and this changing is _progress_. Without it there can be none—the very essence of progress consists in the suppressing of old forms of strife, the conquest of old difficulties and the escape from their thraldom. We know that there was once a time when men were hairy beings who dwelt in caves, and contended with club and hatchet against the monsters which assailed them; and now supposing that we could take some man of modern times, some one who has risen to eminence and power under the conditions which now prevail, and put him among those cavemen, how do you suppose that he would make out? How do you suppose that he would fare, if he were placed even one century back, in the country of the Iroquois, where the snapping of a twig and the flight of an arrow decided the fate of a man? Is it not obvious that there has been here an entire change in the _form_ of the struggle for existence? The same thing is true of nations. Once upon a time a nation was an army, and fighting was its business, the conquering of its neighbours was its glory and its ideal; but now we have moved on, we have become complex and highly organised, and can no longer afford to conquer our neighbours. It would not pay us financially, and intellectually and morally it would destroy us. We have, for instance, a powerful country to the north of us; and imagine what would be the inconvenience and waste were we under the necessity of fortifying all our boundary lines, and keeping garrisons at every few miles of them; if every day we were shaken by rumours that an army was gathering at Montreal, that a fleet of torpedo-boats was building at Toronto. As a matter of simple fact, do we not both go quietly on our way, understanding that we are two civilised nations, between which a war of conquest would be an unthinkable crime? We have grown to used to the change, that the mere memory of the old ways of life makes us shudder; it seems to us horrible, and we forget that it was once beautiful and delightful to men: that the Germans of the time of Tacitus held fighting the joy of life, and imagined a heaven where a man might be patched up every night and fight again the next day. We have passed so far beyond such a state that we cannot even imagine it, and we have lost the power of seeing that it was ever necessary and right; that to those long ages of struggle we owe our physical being, with all its perfections, which we take so as a matter of course; a swift foot and a dexterous hand, an ear attuned to every sound, an eye that adjusts itself to every distance, a mind quick and alert, a spirit bold and enterprising. And in the same way the nations owe to war their unity and their complexity, and a great deal of their power, not merely physical, but industrial and moral as well. It was one of the noblest of the world’s poets who wrote that: