higher Kultur than its neighbours, and that, in endeavouring to impose it on them, it was carrying out the “law of history.” It is a pity that science and history ever adopted the word “law.” What they mean, of course, is only a summary of the way in which things uniformly occurred in certain conditions. Now that the conditions are entirely changed, the laws have no application. One might suggest that we still need armies to conquer and civilise the outstanding barbaric peoples. We do not. We need an international armed force to check their aggressions, but there are other and better methods of civilising them. In any case, this plea has no relation to the vast armies and navies and the bloody wars we actually endure.
But it is the next and final phase of militarism which the historical apologists for war have so grossly overlooked: the phase when the best stocks of the old race are extinguished on the battlefield or enervated by the luxurious idleness which was bought by the spoils of war. Is it not proverbial how the great families which had led the invincible legions of Rome dwindled in five centuries into a sickly cluster of parasites or wholly disappeared? Is it not notorious that it was, in the first century of the present era, the healthier provincial stocks which saved Rome from destruction, or postponed its destruction? And do we not find, as time goes on, men from more and more distant provinces, in the end men from the barbaric fringes of the Empire, coming to lead its legions and support its
