for instance, to face the truth, however difficult it may seem, however unkind to our pet prejudices?
There is not the least necessity for the peace advocate to ignore facts in this matter. The race of man loves a soldier just as boys love the pirate, and many of us, perhaps to our great advantage, remain in part boys our lives through. But as, growing out of boyhood, we regretfully discover the sad fact that we cannot be pirates, that we cannot even hunt Indians, nor be scouts, nor even trappers, so surely the time has come to realize that we have grown out of soldiering. The romantic appeal of the ventures of the old Vikings, and even later of piracy,65 was as great as that of war. Yet we superseded the Viking, and we hanged the pirate, though I doubt not we loved him while we hanged him; and I am not aware that those who urged the suppression of piracy were vilified, except by the pirates, as maudlin sentimentalists, who ignored human nature, or, in Homer Lea's phrase, as "half-educated, sick-brained visionaries, denying the inexorability of the primordial law of struggle." Piracy interfered seriously with the trade and industry of those who desired to earn for themselves as good a living as they could get, and to obtain from this imperfect world all that it had to offer. Piracy was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not business. We are prepared to sing about the Viking, but not to tolerate him on the high seas; and some of us who are quite prepared to give the soldier his due place in poetry and legend and romance, quite prepared to