It should scarcely be necessary to say how conventionalized are the passions that make nations fight one another. Like the personal-honor code of the duelist is diplomacy’s schedule of the degrees of possible offensiveness in the conduct of other nations and their representatives, with a parallel column for appropriate ways of resenting each sort of disagreeableness. And the extreme mode of resentment, war, has a definite place in this code. Nations do not wait to be hurtled into war by explosions of popular wrath. The matter is much more in the control of reason than this. War-making is one of the legally recognized functions of the state, and all the necessary machinery--from secretaries of war to a supply of gas-masks--is kept constantly on hand. How odd it is that the people as a rule think of wars, even modern wars, as calamities that, like a tornado or a tidal wave, just happen, or as a horror that “bad” nations thrust upon “good” ones. Wars occur, just as fisticuffs or shootings occur among a frontier populace, and just as measured words of resentment are spoken where culture prevails, namely, as an expression of the recognized system for dealing with situations of certain sorts. There is nothing inevitable about any of them. When an individual follows the social code of resentment from a sense of duty rather than from hot passion, we find the situation amusing. But when a people that does not desire to fight is governed by officials that do, then occurs the most remarkable, as it is also the most tragic, example of the actual relation between passion and precedent. The populace must now be worked up into a mood that will impel them to kill and to do it with a clear conscience. And how is the war-passion, in fact, aroused? By bringing the proposed or already-declared war under some appropriate precedent or precedents. Farmers and grocers, say, have not kept up with international events sufficiently to know what the friction is all about, or which side is right if either side is, or what probability there is that war will set things right; but they won’t submit to a foreign invader or oppressor, they love their country and its traditions, and they hate the ruthlessness that ravishes women, and starves and mutilates children and wounded soldiers. So, it is “Fight for your altars and your fires; Fight for the green graves of your sires, God and your native land!” The whole scheme of war-propaganda consists in inducing people to classify another country, or a foreign leader, or events under appropriate headings. So precedent-ridden is the passion that has rent the world asunder and now threatens to destroy it.