again on every hand when to-day we look back to the records of the past.
I chance to take down the _Epistles_ of Erasmus, and turn to the letters
which the great Humanist of Rotterdam wrote from Cambridge and London
four hundred years ago when young Henry VIII had just suddenly (in 1514)
plunged into war. One reads them to-day with vivid interest, for here
in the supple and sensitive brain of the old scholar we see mirrored
precisely the same thoughts and the same problems which exercise the
more scholarly brains of to-day. Erasmus, as his Pan-German friends
liked to remind him, was a sort of German, but he was, nevertheless,
what we should now call a Pacifist. He can see nothing good in war and
he eloquently sets forth what he regards as its evils. It is interesting
to observe, how, even in its small details as well as in its great
calamities, war brought precisely the same experiences four centuries
ago as to-day. Prices are rising every day, Erasmus declares, taxation
has become so heavy that no one can afford to be liberal, imports are
hampered and wine is scarce, it is difficult even to get one's foreign
letters. In fact the preparations of war are rapidly changing "the
genius of the Island." Thereupon Erasmus launches into more general
considerations on war. Even animals, he points out, do not fight, save
rarely, and then with only those of other species, and, moreover, not,
like us, "with machines upon which we expend the ingenuity of devils."
In every war also it is the non-combatants who suffer most, the people
build cities and the folly of their rulers destroys them, the most
righteous, the most victorious war brings more evil than good, and even
when a real issue is in dispute, it could better have been settled by
arbitration. The moral contagion of a war, moreover, lasts long after
the war is over, and Erasmus proceeds to express himself freely on the
crimes of fighters and fighting.

Erasmus was a cosmopolitan scholar who habitually dwelt in the world of