every one of them believe that they are fighting for immutable and deathless principles? The civilization of most of them is, of course, as like as two peas, and there is no more reason, except their dislike of rational thought and hard work, why they should fight with one another, than that Illinois should fight with Indiana, despite Homer Lea's fine words as to the primordial character of national differences; to one another they are as alike, and whether San Salvador beats Costa Rica or Costa Rica, San Salvador, does not, so far as essentials are concerned, matter a continental. But their rhetoric of patriotism—the sacrifice, and the deathless glory, and the rest of it—is often just as sincere as ours. That is the tragedy of it, and it is that which gives to the solution of the problem in Spanish America its real difficulty.
But even if we admit that warfare à l'espagnole may be degrading, and that just wars are ennobling and necessary to our moral welfare, we should nevertheless be condemned to degeneracy and decline. A just war implies that someone must act unjustly towards us, but as the general condition improves—as it is improving in Europe as compared with Central and South America, or Morocco, or Arabia—we shall get less and less "moral purification"; as men become less and less disposed to make unjustifiable attacks, they will become more and more degenerate. In such incoherence are we landed by the pessimistic and impossible philosophy that men will decay and die unless they go on killing each other.
What is the fundamental error at the base of the theory that war makes for the survival of the