The case is altered when we turn from savagery to civilisation. The new
and more complex social order while, on the one hand, it presents
substitutes for war in so far as war is a source of virtues, on the
other hand, renders war a much more dangerous performance both to the
individual and to the community, becoming indeed, progressively more
dangerous to both, until it reaches such a climax of world-wide injury
as we witness to-day. The claim made in primitive societies that warfare
is necessary to the maintenance of virility and courage, a claim so
fully admitted that only the youth furnished with trophies of heads or
scalps can hope to become an accepted lover, is out of date in
civilisation. For under civilised conditions there are hundreds of
avocations which furnish exactly the same conditions as warfare for the
cultivation of all the manly virtues of enterprise and courage and
endurance, physical or moral. Not only are these new avocations equally
potent for the cultivation of virility, but far more useful for the
social ends of civilisation. For these ends warfare is altogether less
adapted than it is for the social ends of savagery. It is much less
congenial to the tastes and aptitudes of the individual, while at the
same time it is incomparably more injurious to Society. In savagery
little is risked by war, for the precious heirlooms of humanity have not
yet been created, and war can destroy nothing which cannot easily be
remade by the people who first made it. But civilisation possesses--and
in that possession, indeed, civilisation largely consists--the precious
traditions of past ages that can never live again, embodied in part in
exquisite productions of varied beauty which are a continual joy and
inspiration to mankind, and in part in slowly evolved habits and laws of
social amenity, and reasonable freedom, and mutual independence, which
under civilised conditions war, whether between nations or between
classes, tends to destroy, and in so destroying to inflict a permanent
loss in the material heirlooms of Mankind and a serious injury to the