he can be in no better service. Be sure of it, for the Bible tells you so."11
Canon Newbolt, Dean Farrar, and the Archbishop of Armagh, have all written not dissimilarly.
The whole case may be summarized thus:
- Nations fight for opposing conceptions of right: it is the moral conflict of men.
- They fight from non-rational causes of a lower kind: from vanity, rivalry, pride of place, the desire to occupy a great situation in the world, or from sheer hostility to dissimilar people—the blind strife of mutually hating men.
- These causes justify war, or render it inevitable. The first is admirable in itself, the second is inevitable, in that the peoples readiest to fight, and showing most energy in fighting, replace the more peacefully inclined, and the warlike type tends thus permanently to survive; "the warlike nations inherit the earth."
Or it may be put deductively, thus: Since struggle is the law of life, and a condition of survival as much with nations as with other organisms, pugnacity, which is merely intense energy in struggle, a readiness to accept struggle in its acutest form, must necessarily be a quality marking those individuals successful in the vital contests. It is this deep-seated, biological law which renders impossible the acceptance by mankind of the literal injunction to turn the other cheek to the smiter, or for human nature ever to conform to the ideal implied in that injunction; since, were it accepted, the best men and nations—in the sense of the kindliest and most humane—would be placed at the mercy of the most brutal, who, eliminating the least brutal, would stamp the survivors with their own brutality and re-establish the militarist