advantage in discovering the immorality of the duel. We abolished
dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and other brutalising
spectacles. We undertook a reform of our industrial and penal systems
which, however imperfect it be, was very considerable in itself, and was
inspired solely by motives of humanity. There was a general and marked
improvement of public sentiment, and it is as part of this improvement
that we now find a universal condemnation of aggressive war and a
widespread demand for the entire abolition of war. The construction of
English history and English character on the lines of Mr. G. B. Shaw may
be entertaining, and may save considerable trouble of research, but it
does not conduce to sound judgment. The laments of social pessimists and
of certain religious controversialists are never supported by accurate
knowledge. Every social historian who gives evidence of knowing the
evils of the England of a century ago as well as the England of to-day
admits that there has been a great moral advance.

I will examine in the next chapter certain comments of religious writers
and speakers on this advance. Here I wish to determine the facts with
some clearness. It has not been necessary for me to discuss the medieval
and the early modern period with any fullness. There is no dispute about
the features of those periods. They were ages of violence, of incessant
and frankly aggressive war, of unrestrained ambition. The smallest
pretext sufficed for a monarch, if his forces and finances were in
order, to invade his neighbour's territory and annex as much of it as
he could hold by the sword. Frederic the Great and Napoleon did not
introduce new ideas into Europe; they attempted to revive medieval ideas
in a changing world. Austria in its annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Germany in its ambition to annex Belgium and the colonies
which other Powers have laboriously cultivated, are following their
example. They are not inventing new forms of criminality; they are not