sentimentalists and cowards and men of slothful ease. What will become of the strenuous life if you introduce police?"62
The whole thing falls to the ground; and if we do not compose poems about typhoid it is because typhoid does not attract us and war does. That is the bottom of the whole matter, and it simplifies things a great deal to admit honestly that while no one is thrilled by the spectacle of disease, most of us are thrilled by the spectacle of war—that while none of us are fascinated by the spectacle of a man struggling with a disease, most of us are by the spectacle of men struggling with one another in war. There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war.
As we become a little more educated, we realize that human psychology is a complex and not a simple thing; that because we yield ourselves to the thrill of the battle spectacle we are not bound to conclude that the processes behind it, and the nature behind it, are necessarily all admirable; that the readiness to die is not the only test of virility or a fine or noble nature.
In the book to which I have just referred (Mr. Steevens' "With Kitchener to Khartoum")