indulgent emotions. The war is either a blessing or a curse. One would
think that there was not much room for choice, but we saw that some are
bold enough to hint that the spiritual good may outweigh the bodily
pain. They remind us of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi writing smugly of
the moral grandeur of war, the need to brace the slackness of human
nature periodically by war, the chivalry and devotion it calls out, and
so on.

Still worse is the theory of those who regard war frankly as a curse,
yet put it to the direct authorship of the Almighty. This theory is
natural enough in the minds of men and women who believe in hell. In
earlier ages men could not distinguish between the law of retaliation
and the need to deter criminals by using violence against them when they
transgressed. In many primitive systems of justice the law of
retaliation is expressly consecrated. It is even introduced,
inconsistently and as a survival of barbaric times, in the Babylonian
and the Judaic codes, side by side with saner views. It is, of course,
merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man
knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the
growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was
recognised, and the community, by its representatives, inflicted a
"punishment" on the offender instead of allowing the offended to
retaliate. With the modern improvement of moral sentiments we have
realised that this is an imperfect advance on the barbaric idea. The
community has no more right to "punish" than the offended individual
had. We now impose hardship on an offender only for the purpose of
intimidating him from repeating the offence, or of deterring others from
offending. The idea is still somewhat crude, and a third stage will in
time be reached; but it is satisfactory that we now--not since the
advent of Christianity, but since the rise of modern humanism--all admit