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Heav'n help the Prussian, fragile and oppress'd,
Whose injur'd feelings lacerate his breast.
O Cruel World! This peaceful creature spare,
That he may ravage land, and sea, and air!
"We will not fight. We will not march to war".
Charles D. Isaacson.
Horatius at the bridge intrepid stands,
A branch of olive in his gentle hands.
Th' Etruscan host draws nearer, and with pride
The manly hero bows and steps aside!
The Renaissance of Manhood.
After the degrading debauch of craven pacifism through which our sodden and feminised public has lately floundered, a slight sense of shame seems to be appearing, and the outcries of peace-at-any-price maniacs are less violent than they were a few months ago. Military training for business and professional men has been provided at Plattsburg, N.Y., and the high schools of Providence, R.I. have established, and despite the wails of the universal peace is more than the Conservative can fathom. The essential pugnacity and treachery of mankind is only too evident; and that every nation, even though pledged, would actually abolish means of warfare is absolutely unthinkable. Should the entire civilised world agree simultaneously to disarm, one or more nations would undoubtedly retain secret armaments and at the proper time take advantage of their more altruistic and less astute contemporaries in a wild career of conquest against unarmed victims. To say that higher culture would reason away the causes of war is complete idiocy. Germany, generally conceded to have been the world's most philosophical and intellectual nation, has achieved an equal fame in martial cruelty and bestiality. No country is, or ever can be "above" warfare, until the basic impulses of the human animal shall have miraculously changed.
Aversion to just war can arise from one of four causes; (1) unconscious physical cowardice engendered by long years of peace, (2) hysterical idealism produced from incomplete training in pure science, (3) mental bias derived from an erratic, temperamental intellect, and (4) that plain, obtuse servility which copies and spreads the opinions of others. Under the first head of unconscious physical cowards we must group the sobbing sisterhood who sigh forth in melody of questionable musical and poetical value that "They Didn't Raise Their Boys to be Soldiers". Physical cowardice is not always for one's self; it may be sympathetic cowardice for others; but its unfailing sign is the exaggerated importance and gravity of human suffering. This "cowardice" may sometimes do immense good in lessening the minor discomforts of life, but it must not be allowed to exceed its province and sap the virile vigour of a nation.
