barbarian, or the man between savagery and civilisation, was still
compelled to fight for his possessions. He was usually surrounded by
fierce savage tribes. The civilised man in turn was surrounded by
savages and barbarians, and needed to fight. So through thousands of
years of development of moral sentiment and legal procedure the
primitive method of the beast has been preserved.

But I am not writing a history of warfare, and need not describe these
stages more closely, or examine the new sentiment of imperialist
expansion which gave civilisations a fresh incentive to develop methods
of warfare. The point of interest is to determine at what stage it might
have been possible for the moral element to intervene and bid the
warriors, in the name of humanity, lay down their arms; at what stage
the tribunal which men had set up to adjudicate between the quarrels of
individuals might have been enlarged so as to be capable of arbitrating
on the quarrels of nations.

Now this was plainly impossible in the early centuries of the present
era, and it is therefore foolish to ask why Pagan moralists did not do
what we expect Christian moralists to have done. I have already
mentioned, and have fully described elsewhere, how humanitarian
sentiments were generally diffused throughout the old Græco-Roman world.
There is not a phrase of the New Testament which has not a parallel
among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The great
fusion of peoples in the Roman Empire begot a feeling of brotherhood,
and, by a natural reaction on years of vice and violence, there was a
considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable,
sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with
dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato
and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these