nation is a modern idea; in early ages all nations were
destructible, and the further we go back, the more incessant was the
work of destruction. The internal decoration of nations is a sort of
secondary process, which succeeds when the main forces that create
nations have principally done their work. We have here been
concerned with the political scaffolding; it will be the task of
other papers to trace the process of political finishing and
building. The nicer play of finer forces may then require more
pleasing thoughts than the fierce fights of early ages can ever
suggest. It belongs to the idea of progress that beginnings can
never seem attractive to those who live far on; the price of
improvement is, that the unimproved will always look degraded.

But how far are the strongest nations really the best nations? how
far is excellence in war a criterion of other excellence? I cannot
answer this now fully, but three or four considerations are very
plain. War, as I have said, nourishes the 'preliminary' virtues, and
this is almost as much as to say that there are virtues which it
does not nourish. All which may be called 'grace' as well as virtue
it does not nourish; humanity, charity, a nice sense of the rights
of others, it certainly does not foster. The insensibility to human
suffering, which is so striking a fact in the world as it stood when
history first reveals it, is doubtless due to the warlike origin of
the old civilisation. Bred in war, and nursed in war, it could not
revolt from the things of war, and one of the principal of these is
human pain. Since war has ceased to be the moving force in the
world, men have become more tender one to another, and shrink from
what they used to inflict without caring; and this not so much
because men are improved (which may or may not be in various cases),
but because they have no longer the daily habit of war--have no