Amidst the chaos of domestic politics and the wavelike surge of contending social desires the biological law of competition still rules the destinies of nations as of individual men. And as the ethical essence of competition is sacrifice, as each generation of plants or of animals perishes in the one case, or toils or dares in the other, that its offspring may survive, so with a nation, the future of the next generation is determined by the self-sacrifice or the absence of self-sacrifice of that which precedes it.

The bud flowers and the flower dies, and dying, flings its seeds on the winds to produce, if it may be, a wider re-creation of itself. And in the animal world the sacrificial impulse of maternal love fronts all peril and endures all suffering that its young may live.

That impulse, in the later manifestations of evolution, is the root source of all human families, and of all human morality. And it finds its crown in patriotism, in the sacrifice which a nation makes to fulfil the trust which it has inherited from its fathers, and to hand down that heritage, not diminished but increased, to the generations that succeed.

If the springs of national action fail; if at a crisis when international rivalry is acute a given generation shrinks from the effort and the sacrifice necessary to self-preservation, then that generation is a traitor at once to its past and to its future. It dishonors the dead, who, in their earthly hour, did make that effort and that sacrifice when the time called for these. To those noble dead it is an ingrate, and of its own children it is the fraudulent betrayer. For what it has, that it has received on the implicit condition that it shall pass it on. The

soul is gone out of a people when it recoils from a duty which the claims of its history and of its posterity alike impose. Has the soul gone out of England, or does it still inhere?

England is still the heart and core of the aggregation of nations and of races which owe allegiance, not to her, but to the crown of her sovereignthat crown whose influence the ages have extended into the wide spaces of the world. Considered from the standpoint of the true Imperialist, England is but a province; but she is a pivotal province, the pivotal province of the British Empire. Upon her shoulders rests the main weight of that Empire's burden. From her long-suffering taxpayers is derived by far the major portion of the revenue which supports the British navy and the British army. By her sons those Services are chiefly manned. Withdraw from their support the wealth of England, withdraw from their ranks her men, and the fabric of Empire must fall like a house of cards. For Scotland and Wales and Ireland contribute but a relatively small part of the money, and though perhaps in a greater proportion—still far the lesser number of the men. This is a fact inseparable from their inferiority in population and in wealth. As for the oversea dominions of the King, they are but now beginning to awaken to the realities of the world of competing nations of which they are a part. They have but begun to move in earnest, and, with the exception of New Zealand, they have as yet given no contribution to the common defence in the least proportionate to their financial or their numerical power. If England fell suddenly from her place in the House of the British peoples; if the support of the Flag were left with the oversea dominions, plus "the Kel

tic fringe," and the lowlands of Scotland, then there would be a speedy end of the British Raj.

We may ask again, then, what of England? Is the heart that once was hers still strong to dare and to resolve and to endure? How shall we know? By the test. What test? That which God has given for the trial of peoples -the test of war.

Does this mean that with an insanity of action exceeding even the madness of neglected preparation England is to precipitate the unready Empire into conflict with the prepared and watchful foe? It does not imply any such criminal folly.

What it does imply is that victory is the result of efficiency, and that efficiency is the result of spiritual quality. Self-sacrifice, self-denial, temperance, hardihood, discipline, obedience, order, method, organizing power, intelligence, purity of public life, chastity, industry, resolution, are some only of the national and individual attributes which go towards producing the efficiency of modern armaments. And the efficiency or inefficiency of its armaments is the determining factor of a nation's success, or of a nation's failure, at that culminating moment of long processes of commercial and diplomatic rivalry -the moment of war.

Thus, then, efficiency in war, or rather efficiency for war, is God's test of a nation's soul. By that test it stands, or by that test it falls. This is the ethical content of competition. This is the determining factor of human history. This is the justification of war.

In the realms of sub-human life, in the world of animals, as in the world of men, this law, perhaps so modified that its working would have been to us undiscernible, must still have prevailed. At least the tendency must have persisted that the higher organism should conquer the lower. For if

there had been no such tendency, how could the higher organism have constantly emerged?

In the sweep of the ages, in the passage of time, the qualities that make for victory have assumed, gradually, nobler hue. In the confused conflicts of earlier times to detect the secret process by which the higher tended ever to supersede the lower must have been hard indeed. Many are the cases recorded in the annals of mankind when might has struck down right. Many more must be the unrecorded instances when the like occurred. But the course of development of human society depends not on exceptions, however numerous, but on the rule. And the rule was, as analysis shows, not that "might was right," but that right always tended to create might. By "right" is here intended no artificial conception, and no imagined claim to territory. For supposititious "rights" of this kind have in history no validity save when based on force. What is meant is a righteousness of national life which included all or most of the qualities enumerated above as produeing efficiency in war. This is the only kind of "right" possessed by a people which has enduring value.

As regards the present, the truth of these statements can hardly be doubted by any reasoning mind. As regards the past, the briefest survey of salient facts will establish their correctness. The triumph of the Greeks over the Persians was the triumph of a higher civilization and a nobler manhood. Marathon and Salamis were as the swords that kept the gates of Europe against the barbarian, and they were the direct fruit of a lofty spirit inhabiting a great race. When, later, the Macedonian phalanx penetrated the East, that penetration represented the victory of the higher intelligence and the greater discipline. The sequent overthrow of Greek by Roman was the

result of an austerer morality, of a deeper devotion to national ends and of a more perfect union. Each one of these three events meant the advance of mankind: each was the product of a military efficiency founded on a higher morale.

But if these instances are in themselves striking; if these scenes in the drama of the development of man exhibit the working, through war, of what Matthew Arnold called "A something not ourselves that makes for righteousness"; far more impressive, far more awful, is the tremendous tragedy of which they were the prologue, and which bisects the history of the Western world. Towards the close of the fifth century, says Professor Freeman, “civilization perished in blood and flames." It is a brief phrase. Who is there who can realize its full intent? But the question we ask here is, why this gigantic catastrophe occurred this disaster which flung back the march of human thought and human science for a thousand years? If there be one thing certain, it is that civilization tends to become stronger than barbarism. How comes it then that civilization fell before barbarism?

The answer to that question is to be found in the decay of the military spirit among the Roman people. That decay again was itself the product of the degeneracy of public and private morality. In other words, civilization perished because its spiritual quality failed. Not all the arts, nor all the literature, nor all the splendor and the refinements of the Roman world saved that world from destruction at the hands of Vandals and of Goths. Ruthless, inexorable, the law of the survival of the fittest trampled on the corrupt. Of that law, war is the supreme instrument, and of war, in the long passage of the centuries, the deciding factor is the soul.

This is not the doctrine of the mar

ket place, or of the political pulpit, or of the Radical Party. In the Englishspeaking world, when the stern virtues which alone lead to national survival are decaying, it is not teaching likely to be popular. But it happens to be the inner truth which analysis of history reveals.

Let those who dispute this conclusion test the validity of their denial by applying it, not to the past, but to the present. Take away from the Japanese their patriotism, their public spirit, their discipline, and their vast capacity for self-sacrifice, and, after these withdrawals, what will then remain of their naval and military power? Only the shell without the kernel; only the material without the moving spirit which gives that material life. question answers itself.

Truly the

Let a like subtraction be made from the qualities possessed by the German legions, and how much of their present menace to Europe will remain? Take from the nations which have produced these forces their persevering industry and their resolute thoroughness, and then say whether their navies and their armies will retain their potency. Or fill these countries with debauchery, destroy the sanctities of family life, make sexual immorality in its widest sense not the exception, but the rule, and then consider how long either Germany or Japan would retain its place in arms.

But if it be true, as these and like considerations go to prove, that warlike efficiency at the present time is the price of moral and spiritual quality, and perishes if such quality die, then must not similar attributes have tended throughout history to produce similar effect?

The same causes must always have tended towards the same results, but the purpose immanent in the universe becomes more manifest as evolution proceeds. When the processes of war

are crude, and when the scale on which it is waged is small, the effects are far less evident of those great underlying causes which in the passage of generations have produced, despite all exceptions, their destined ends. But now when armaments are the epitomes of nations, and when the capacity to bear those armaments sums up the progress of a people, those who have eyes to see can at last divine the ethical content of war. Defeat in war is the fruit of naval and military inefficiency, and that inefficiency is the inevitable sequel to moral decay. Victory in war is the method by which, in the economy of God's providence, the sound nation supersedes the unsound, because in our time such victory is the direct offspring of a higher efficiency, and the higher efficiency is the logical outcome of the higher morale.

At the stage of development which mankind has now reached, those great human families which we call nations still constitute in the main the fundamental divisions of the whole race. These nations possess for the most part an intense organic life of their own. They are in fact individual organisms. Each organism, while health animates it, feels the same impulse to grow and to compete with its rivals for increased means of subsistence which all knowledge and all experience present to our eyes in the sphere of biology, of which sphere nations in actual fact form a part.

And just as in the earlier and humbler domains of that sphere the higher type ever tended to survive, so in this later period of biological development the higher and the nobler people tends always to secure victory in that culmination of international competition which we call war. Hence it follows that if the dream of short-sighted and superficial sentimentalists could be fulfilled-that is to say, if war could suddenly be rendered henceforth impossi

ble upon earth (which is at present impracticable)—the machinery by which national corruption is punished and national virtue rewarded would be ungeared. The higher would cease to supersede the lower, and the course of human evolution would suffer arrest.

This is a conception of the function of war which (as I venture to believe) has not been hitherto placed directly before the public. It is a conception which will be profoundly repugnant to those who think that they know better than the Power behind phenomena how the affairs of this, and perhaps of other worlds, ought to be arranged.

Cease

less efforts are being made alike in the United Kingdom and in the United States to destroy what remains of the military spirit in the Anglo-Saxon race. War, and the preparation for war, without which it brings defeat, are represented as barbaric survivals which can be abolished by international agreements.

With such an object Mr. Carnegie has recently invested two millions sterling in a trust, with, it is said, the sagacious proviso that the balance, after the object has been attained, shall be devoted to some further worthy end. At the present epoch of the world's history, Mr. Carnegie might just as well have created a trust for the abolition of death, with the understanding that after this trifling change in human conditions had been achieved, the remaining funds should be assigned to the endowment of asylums for the imbecile.

For however frightful an evil war may appear, it is at any rate far less fatal to the human race than death, of whose manifestations it is a part. But than the part the whole is greater, and thus is death greater than war. Yet death is essential to human life, as we know it. For if there were no death, how would the existence of mankind upon this planet be thinkable? At all