maker" in his hip pocket is afraid. The gentleman who walks down Pennsylvania Avenue without one is not afraid.

Our disgraceful, unwonted fear, so different from our calm courage of thirty years ago, so far as it is spurious, is only the simulated fear of certain vested interests. So far as it is genuine, it is due to poisonous suggestions of a yellow press and of certain men trained only in the technique of war, who could command no influence were it not for an uninformed and credulous populace.

A

CHAPTER VI

SOME FALLACIES OF ADMIRAL MAHAN'S

THOUSAND women in their clubs through

out the country vehemently discuss the ethics involved in giving an overdose of chloral to shorten the death agonies of one's best beloved. A thousand men sign a petition to abolish the execution of convicted murderers. Why is it that perhaps not a hundred in either thousand are making practical and earnest effort to end the killing of myriads of able-bodied, innocent men in war?

There are several reasons for this paradox. The power to put one's self in the other fellow's place, to read statistics with the illumination of imagination and sympathy, is less developed at school than the power to recite exceptions to the rule governing the dative case. A mangled dog in sight compels more tears than the thought of twenty thousand mangled men in Manchuria. Moreover, we are under the obsession of the tradition that the military expert must inevitably best understand the problem of national defence, and that the latter implies armaments solely. When,

therefore, a distinguished naval expert and exemplary Christian gentleman discourses on this theme and tells us that war is inevitable, the layman is overawed and dumb. How should one who knows nothing of battleships or lyddite shells presume to talk on national defence?

Because national defence depends on many other things than armies and navies; because the military man, with his specialised training, is the very last man to be aware of these, and the layman-the tourist, merchant, or diplomat—who has come into contact with other nations in normal relations may know many things about national defence that the man who studies life in abnormal conditions of war does not perceive.

Said a retired United States rear-admiral during the Boer War: "I tell you what England ought to do. She ought to whip France." "What, now, when her hands are tied in South Africa?" exclaimed his friend aghast. "Yes, yes; it would do good and clear the air," was the testy response. "But do you mean to have her go to war about nothing?" "Yes, yes; she could do it and clear the air." Ability to manage a squadron implies little knowledge of statesmanship or international ethics; although, of course, the above gross instance was exceptional and would be as readily condemned by Admiral Mahan as by a Quaker.

But Admiral Mahan's misconceptions and errors regarding the aims and arguments of the new peace party are typical and therefore important

to analyse. First, he darkens understanding by defining war to suit his own fancy and uses the term indiscriminately to cover the literal and figurative use of the word as well as civil war, international war, past war, and future war. All conflict he considers war, saying: "All organised force is by degree war." It should be clearly understood that the peace party opposes only organised, deliberate killing of human beings; its members themselves often share in righteous and necessary conflicts which do not involve the deliberate killing of innocent men. Many ludicrous instances of addled ideas on this subject might be adduced to show the danger in the thoughtless use of terms which confound war with all forms of force. In a certain city the window of a church bookshop was filled with gay, alluring juvenile books on war. A press comment on the incongruity of such a spectacle instantly elicited a silent answer (?) to the protest: a large picture of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers was placed beside the books! As if the Founder of our religion would sanction a father's killing his son just because he was known to have chastised him!

A naive newspaper reporter once assumed that my objection to international war would involve condemnation of football; and another youth based his supposed disagreement from my position upon his having been obliged to threaten to knock down an insulting companion if he repeated his

insult.

"But "But you would not kill him, would you?" I inquired. "Of course not, "Of course not," was his horrified "But I was talking about killing," I rejoined. “Oh, is that the point? Killing? Yes, yes, I see," was his relieved reply

response.

The muddle-headedness which discerns only a difference in degree and not in kind between organised killing and an organised boycott, or the wholesome thrashing of a schoolyard bully, or such war of words as was waged by the non-resistant, William Lloyd Garrison, seems to be a weakness of many religious journals as well as of military men. The constant assumption that those who condemn future international war are spineless weaklings, devoid of patriotism and the spirit of struggle and adventure, is due to precisely this careless confounding of a form of contest-warwith those manifold other forms of contest in which all brave men should take a valiant part.

Secondly, Admiral Mahan's classing of international war with all other forms of strife leads to his conceiving it impossible to end any one form of violence until all are ended. The cause of universal peace he holds is "nothing more than the cause of universal education." The abolitionists of war are in a measure to blame for the common confusion of thought thus evinced. At the National Peace Congresses, I do not recall a speaker who called attention to the sharp distinction to be drawn between international war, which can be ended by proper organisation, and civil war,