that no modern war can ever "pay." Let him realise that overweening armaments, with their perpetual menace and infrequent use, are daily mulcting him in damages which can only lead at last either to collision or collapse. Let him understand that by cooperation, not by conflict, nations flourish, and that for survival as for prosperity, Work, and not War, has the sanction of primordial Law. Yet the risk remains that the man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. Selfishness, however conjured into courtesy, will still lean to strife, and tend to grow angry and fierce in face of opposition. Hence in the enormous reformation of opinion which Mr. Angell desiderates, there is abundant call for the transforming power of that higher spirit than the world can produce which lies in the depths of all men's consciousness, and which alone is able to change the evil nature out of which war-motives spring. And they are not to be accounted hinderers in this crusade who hold that social reformations are to be worked out by spiritual means, and that the seed of social ethics will best fructify in the soil of spiritual experience.

Some indeed maintain all lower methods useless, and history certainly gives them a better case than can be claimed by Mr. Angell to justify his own interdict. But why ban either? Because Tolstoi disallowed the kind of weapon so dexterously employed in The Great Illusion, why repeat his fanaticism in the opposite sense? Since every possible argument is badly needed, let these typical champions both be recognised as true allies. In the year 1815, Europe was rescued from an unimaginable bondage. Militarism, personified in the Corsican adventurer who

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sought to dominate the world, suffered a crushing defeat. Duty triumphed over Glory. But on that historic field there is a feature more striking than either Hougomont or La Haye Sainte. It is still commemorated as La Belle Alliance." And Mr. Angell's Waterloo will never be won by his own artillery alone. There must be an awakening among all nations of a far higher spirit than the cleverest appeal to self-interest can either produce or maintain. For it is this higher spirit, and not the doctrine of expediency, which has demolished the worst evils in the past, and which will in turn destroy what is gradually coming to be recognised as evil by the quickened Conscience of Humanity to-day.

One of our author's axioms is the complexity of human nature. It is consequently a citadel with many avenues of approach, which may be effectively stormed with very diverse engines, and from precisely opposite quarters. Those who favour the low road have no need to block the high. Many a man quite impervious to logic may be strongly moved through his moral nature. Another may take the view of Elihu Burritt, and see that, however people may laugh at the plan of arbitration, the warlike plan is infinitely more ludicrous: "The inequality of horses, a disparity in the power of wielding the sword, or the possession of high powers of strategy in a general, are circumstances which the merest child can understand have no connection either with Justice or national Honour." But already the world is indisposed to laugh at either alternative. And one day, when Arbitration is finally enthroned, the public opinion which effects the change will be the creation

not merely of those convinced by Mr. Angell that War is unprofitable; it will be also, and perhaps rather, the work of the gathering host who feel War to be a crime against man and a sin against God.

Thus in this great struggle upward of civilised humanity out of the engulfing ocean of its armaments, it is suicidal strategy either to regard as hostile or to reject as useless those great spiritual forces which are more reliable allies than the cleverest juggling with expediency and selfishness. In that microcosm of the Pagan world, the Roman Amphitheatre, Mr. Angell's " average sensual man" was amply represented. Yet it was the moral effect of an obscure monk's self-sacrifice which brought the bloody games of the Coliseum to an end. Some folk's "hotblooded dislike of a moral appeal is excellent evidence that Conscience is awake, and may therefore soon become an ardent ally. There was a certain fiery little Jew who felt "hot-blooded dislike " enough to stand by at the stoning of Stephen. But Conscience, certainly not expediency, changed him into the greatest Apostle of the proto-Martyr's cause the world has ever seen. And Paul never tried to regenerate the nations with the message "Godliness is profitable," though he felt that to be true.

When, too, in a later day the curse of slavery was lifted, the Gospel of the Abolitionists rang with a far deeper and more moving note than that of selfish interest. The emancipation of the slave was won, not by proving that free labour would produce more sugar and more cotton than the cowhide whip, but by persuading public opinion that slavery as an institution involved horrors which were an outrage on

humanity and an insult to God. This was the sort of "futility" which moved the British Parliamentthat quintessence of the common sense of "the average man "-to vote its Millions to rid England of her share in the disgrace. In the eyes of Mr. Angell "the moral plea "wins nothing but ineffectual "martyrdom" for those who urge it. But history and experience are against him on this point, as the most familiar instances may show. William Wilberforce, John Bright, and the seventh Lord Shaftesbury suffered obloquy but not martyrdom, and the English Statute Book does not record them ineffectual.

The present Chancellor of the Exchequer has had very exceptional experience in dealing both with men and circumstances. What is his verdict? Quite recently he used these words

"There are political reformers who conscientiously believe that they will never be able to save the people until they have destroyed Religion from the world. There was never any more destructive mistake than that. Were it not for the spirit of Religion, the reforms already effected would never have been achieved. If the Christian Church were destroyed, the country would be turned into a burnt-up wilderness, and there would be nothing between the people and what is called Force. And what is that? The spirit of cruelty, the spirit of despotism, the spirit of self-seeking."

Nothing is more certain than that the enormous energy of Public Opinion needed to make War impossible between civilised peoples, will require for its consolidation every possible moral and religious aid. And for this simple reason, that the Opinion necessary must not only reach but maintain a far higher level than can ever be inspired by considerations solely material and mundane. Whatever be their cogency in certain quarters, the prediction is safe that before this tremendous stride in the Social Evolution of mankind is actually made, long drafts will be de

manded on "that great fund of altruistic feeling generated by the ethical system on which our civilisation is founded;" and " the prime motive-force behind the whole series of political and social phenomena peculiar to the modern world "1 will need to be far more widely and vigorously invoked than heretofore.

The fact is that the sanctions of ethics and religion—so far from being a sort of stock-in-trade of "sentimentalists, dreamers and fanatics "-are inextricably woven into the very warp and woof of the modern mind, whether they are acknowledged or denied. And no abuse of these sanctions by "the peace-at-any-price man can make the use of them irrational. Old crusades may be outgrown, but "Deus vult" is never out of date. What is really Right always has Reason on its side, and may by this be recognised. And to demonstrate with Mr. Angell's skill the Reasonableness of a right course is invaluable work. Nevertheless to persuade men of its Rightness is often the surest and sometimes the only way to stir them to take it.

No one disputes with Mr. Angell that "the only permanent revolutions in the history of civilisation are those that result from a revolution of ideas,” but if sociologists, like Mr. Kidd are to be credited, the proposal to interdict the moral plea, and work only on the basis of policy and interest, is equivalent to a proposal to promote the progress of ideas by ignoring the mainspring of the best and most efficacious of them all.

Most people are further agreed that "no mechanism, however well devised, no leagues, no ententes, no exchange of visits, no Hague Conferences, will in

1 Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution, ch. vi. et passim.