J. Novikov, Le Fédération de l'Europe, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labour, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings of a whole sex, and that the biological traditions of women have been associated with a primitive period when they were the delighted spectators of combats. "Woman," thought Nietzsche, "is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour." Steinmetz (Philosophie des Krieges, p. 314), remarking that women are opposed to war in the abstract, adds: "In practice, however, it happens that women regard a particular war—and all wars are particular wars—with special favour"; he remarks that the majority of Englishwomen fully shared the war fever against the Boers, and that, on the other side, he knew Dutch ladies in Holland, very opposed to war, who would yet have danced with joy at that time on the news of a declaration of war against England.

The general strike, which has been especially developed by the syndicalist Labour movement, and is now tending to spread to various countries, is a highly powerful weapon, so powerful that its results are not less serious than those of war. To use it against war seems to be to cast out Beelzebub by Beelzebub. Even in Labour disputes the modern strike threatens to become as serious and, indeed, almost as sanguinary as the civil wars of ancient times. The tendency is, therefore, in progressive countries, as we see in Australia, to supersede strikes by conciliation and arbitration, just as war is tending to be superseded by international tribunals. These two aims are, however, absolutely distinct, and the introduction of law into the disputes between nations can have no direct effect on the disputes between social classes. It is quite possible, however, that it may have an indirect effect, and that when disputes between nations are settled in an orderly manner, social feeling will forbid disputes between classes to be settled in a disorderly manner.