impulse to kill our neighbors on account of religious differences, and (at least in the case of the Anglo-Saxon) to kill our neighbors in duels for some cause of wounded vanity.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activities and its infinitesimal proportion of military ones, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?
Not only evolution, but common sense and common observation, teaches us that we develop most those qualities which we exercise most, which serve us best in the occupation in which we are most engaged. A race of seamen is not developed by agricultural pursuits, carried on hundreds of miles from the sea.
Take the case of what is reputed (quite wrongly, incidentally) to be the most military nation in Europe—Germany. The immense majority of adult Germans—practically, all who make up what we know as Germany—have never seen a battle, and in all human probability never will see one. In forty years eight thousand Germans have been in the field about twelve months—against naked blacks.30 So that the proportion of warlike activities to peaceful activities works out at one to hundreds of thousands. I wish it were possible to illustrate this diagrammatically; but it could not be done in this book, because, if a single dot the size of a full-stop were to be used to illustrate the expenditure of time in actual war, I should have to fill most of the book with dots to illustrate the time spent by the balance of the population in peace activities.31
In that case, how can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities, when