to establish a relation between nations that shall at least provide for their security. A nation which defends itself against aggression is both saving itself and also contending for the principle of nationality. It asks no more for itself than it concedes to its opponent - the privilege, namely, of existing and of administering its own internal affairs. Such a defensive war has then a double motive, the narrower motive of national security and the higher motive of general international security.

Even the narrower of these motives is a moral motive for the individual. The state is for most men the highest good which comes at all within the range of their experience. It is incomparably superior to the good with which in the daily round of work and play they are mainly preoccupied. It is often shifted or ignored, even by those persons of unselfish purpose who oppose war because it threatens to interrupt the work of social betterment. Thus Mr. Philip Snowden exhorts us eloquently to 'realize that a beautiful school is a grander sight than a battleship a contented and prosperous peasantry than great battalions.' Nobody in his sober senses would deny it. But let Mr. Snowden and his friends on their part realize that his beautiful school and his prosperous peasantry exist by the grace of a state which owes its origin and its security to the vigilance and energy of men who understood its real importance.

The security of the state means the security of all the good things that exist within the state. We in America are fond of being let alone. The thought of war annoys us because life is so full of good things that we hate to be interrupted. But liberty and opportunity are the fruits of our national existence, and if we love them we would do well to cherish that national existence in which they are rooted. Fighting men as a rule understand this better than

peace-makers. The individual understands it better on the field of battle than he does in the place where he earns his living or in the place where he goes when he is tired. It has become the custom to emphasize man's savagery, and belittle or suspect his sentiments. We need to be reminded that the average soldier is thinking and feeling more generously than the average civilian. We have come to speak of patriotism as though it meant mere self-assertion; and have forgotten that patriots are individuals who, while collectively they may be asserting themselves against the enemy, are individually denying themselves for their country. And it is of this self-denying loyalty that they are most keenly conscious. "The peace advocates,' wrote Mr. Godkin in the days of Gravelotte and Orléans, 'are constantly talking of the guilt of killing, while the combatants only think, and will only think, of the nobleness of dying.'

It is only in national emergencies that the great majority of men realize that they enjoy the benefits of national existence. Then only is it realized that civic life is the fundamental condition of individual life, and that all forms of economic and cultural activity are vitally dependent on it. The generation that has been born in this country since the Civil War has never had to make sacrifices for the state, and has never been brought to such a realization. We have taken too much for granted. Like spoiled children we have assumed that the staple good of national security was provided by the bounty of nature, and have irritably clamored for the sweetmeats of wealth and higher education. I do not mean to suggest that any people should be satisfied with the minimum, but that we should clearly understand that human goods must follow in a certain order, and that the superstructure rests upon the foundation.

But while the good of the state is greater than that of any individual or special interest, because it contains all of these and nourishes them, how shall it be measured against the good of that other state against which it is arrayed in war? How is it possible to justify patriotism when it makes war on patriotism? Is the state worth fighting for, when it means that there is another state which one is fighting against? Again we must apply our principle, that force is justifiable only when used in the interest of both parties, or in behalf of some higher form of association that is inclusive of both. A just defensive war must therefore be actuated by a higher principle even than that of patriotism. While it is waged primarily on behalf of the great common good of national existence, there must be at the same time a due acknowledgment of the enemy's equal right. The enemy on his part is deserving of forcible restraint only in so far as through his arrogance he prevents or threatens a relationship in which there is room for him as well. War upon such an enemy, like all righteous war, is war upon lawlessness. Although its first effect is destructive, it is provident and constructive in its ulterior effect.

With this principle in mind we may now take a further step and justify offensive war, when undertaken in the interest of an international system or league of humanity. For a century or more this greater cause has stirred the imaginations of men, and it has gradually been adopted as a norm for the criticism of international policy. There is now no serious doubt in liberal and earnest minds of the superiority of this cause to the narrower claims of nationality. How shall nations be so adjusted as to help and not hurt one another? How shall commerce and cultural intercourse be promoted, and dangerous friction and rivalry be removed? How

shall the threat of war be so far reduced that nations can direct their energies and resources internally to the improvement of the lot of the unprivileged and disqualified majority? In theory the answer is as obvious as it is trite: by establishing among nations some greater unit of civic life, some system of international law and equity, with agencies for its application and enforcement. But how shall we go forward to this end? Not by abandoning what has already been achieved, the integrity of the nation. For what we seek is something greater than nationality, not something less. Not by sitting idly by and allowing events to roll over us. Not by awaiting the sudden appearance on earth of some heavensent umpire who shall box our ears and set us about our business. This much seems clear: that this end, if it is to be achieved at all, must be achieved by the greatest forces that man has now at his disposal. Nations and leagues of nations must assume the functions of international control. Their very strength, so terrible in destruction, must be directed to the larger end of construction. Just as the order-loving individual had first to enact the law for himself and in his own behalf, so the more enlightened and more liberal nations must take upon themselves the functions of international justice. One such nation, or an alliance of such nations, will be its first rude organ. Such an organ will necessarily be governed in part by the nearer motive of party interest, but this need not prevent the genuine existence of the higher motive as well. And just as the evolution of democracy means the gradual purification of the governmental motive, the purging of it from admixture with personal, dynastic, and class interests, so we may expect to witness on the larger scale the gradual evolution of some similarly disinterested agency

that shall represent the good of all mankind.

It is commonly and truly said that the present war is the most terrible in history. We have, I believe, been too quick to see in this a reason for despair. Wars become terrible in proportion to the strength of the warring parties, in numbers, organization, and science. But what of this strength? Shall we count it no achievement? A war between Italy and Austria is more terrible than a war between Venice and Genoa, but only because Venice and Genoa have learned to live in peace and have achieved the strength of union and cooperation. We are witnessing to-day, not a mere war between nations, but the more awful collision between alliances of nations. The horror of the catastrophe should not blind us to the fact that France and England, for example, have learned that each has more to gain from the other's prosperity than from its decay, and that their differences are negligible when compared with their common interests. Together they possess strength of a higher order, terrible in war, but proportionally beneficent in peace. The evolution of human solidarity and organization has brought us to the stage of great international alliances.

It is thus in keeping with the record of human progress that the last war should be the worst, and the worst the last. For the only human force more terrible than a league of some nations is the league of all nations, the league of man. The same motive that has led to the one will lead to the other the desire, namely, to avoid the loss and weakness of conflict, and to attain the incomparable advantages of coöperative life; this last alliance

will then have no human adversary left, but may devote its supreme power to perfecting the lot of the individual, and scotching the devil of reaction.

The goods that are worth fighting for are first of all existent goods, embodied in the life of man. Such goods are created by physical forces, may be destroyed by physical forces, and may require to be defended by physical forces. They are worth fighting for when they are greater goods than those which have to be fought against. Civil law is worth fighting for, against the lawless individual. National integrity is worth fighting for, against disruptive factions or unscrupulous rivals. The general good of mankind is worth fighting for, against the narrower purpose of national aggrandizement. These greater goods are worth fighting for; nothing is really worth fighting against. It therefore behooves every high-spirited individual or nation to be both strong and purposeful. Strength without high purpose is soulless and brutal; purpose without strength is unreal and impo

tent.

We in America cannot, it is true, afford to build armies and navies from sheer bravado. Our strength must be consecrated to the best that the most enlightened reason and the most sensitive conscience can discern. But, on the other hand, we cannot afford to cherish any ideal whatsoever unless at the same time we are willing to put forth the effort that is commensurate with its realization. The corrective of militarism is not complacency and neglect, but humane purpose; and the corrective of pacifism is not a lapse into barbarism, but the acquiring of sufficient might and resolution to do the work which that purpose requires.

I HAD known F

I

through years of hunting and sports in India, but never until the night that our old BritishIndia coaster lay off the Shar-el-Arab bar waiting for the turn of the tide to run up to Bassorah, did I hear him speak of the things that were really next his heart. Then it was that I was vouchsafed transient vision of the outer strands of the previsionary web England was weaving beyond the marches of India against events to come. I will give his story, as nearly as I can remember, in his own words.

For the best part of the last five years [said he], I have been coming to Arabia and Mesopotamia on 'language study.' In all of that time I have not been back to England, and I am almost a stranger to the officers of my own regiment. I talk like an Arab, I am beginning to think like an Arab, and, what with sunlight and dirt that have gone so deep under my epidermis that they will never come out, I shall soon look like an Arab. Perhaps in timeyou'd never believe the appeal of the Koran till you've bowed toward Mecca, with a Bedouin on either side of you, morning and evening, for six months at a stretch I shall pray like an Arab. I have had smallpox, dysentery, which has become practically chronic,

and a dozen varieties of fevers and skin diseases, and I'm mottled from head to foot with 'Aleppo button' scars, two of which have never healed. I've

been alone so much that I talk to myself even in Calcutta and Simla. The Persians in this region distrust me, the Russians and Germans hate me, and the Turks are perfectly frank in saying that they will send me on 'the long pilgrimage' if ever a fair chance offers.

All that my government does is to allow my pay to go on and to provide me with a passport that will land me at Koweit, Bassorah, or Bagdad. If I get into trouble they will not — cannot, in fact do as much for me as they would for a spindle-legged Hindu coolie. And all this on the chance that, some time before I am retired for old age or invalided from the Indian army, the Great White Bear will try to come down to the Persian Gulf to slake his age-long thirst. In this contingency, of course, there is no denying the fact that I shall be very much in demand, especially if operations are carried on in my own 'sphere,' that of Northeastern Arabia, and Southern Mesopotamia, up to a line drawn from Bagdad to Hitt.

Afoot, or by horse or camel, I have traversed almost every square mile of this region. There is not a bazaar from Kerbela to Koweit in which, disguised, I cannot mingle unsuspected in the throng, or, in case of need, call upon friends who will do anything, from giving me a cigarette or a handful of dates to risking their lives to save my own. I also know every one of the greater, as well as most of the lesser, Bedouin sheikhs whose peoples roam the deserts between Bassorah and Damascus;

and with one of the most powerful of these - his camels are over 100,000 in number and his sheep and goats three times that I have gone through the 'blood brotherhood' ceremony. The blood of our arms has actually mingled, and each is pledged to stop at no act to serve the other. My friends, I need hardly say, are all Arabs, Chaldeans, Syrians, Jews, or people of one of the other subject races of this region; to the Turk, courteous as he is to me socially in Bagdad and Bassorah, my name is anathema. A week hence, for instance, I shall exchange Oriental amenities with the Vali of Bagdad in his garden on the banks of the Tigris. He will toast me in scented coffee and drink to the success of my visit; and all the while a double guard of police will be watching the gates to prevent my getting away to the desert and my Arab friends. Personally, I know it would pain him if I were to be shot in the dark for neglecting to answer a sentry's challenge; but officially he is dead keen for it, and there is no doubt that it would do him a lot of good in Stamboul, where he is not in very high favor at present.

The whole thing, when all is said and done, resolves itself down to about this: If a war involving operations in this 'sphere' comes within the next twenty years, I, and a couple of other chaps who are doing the same sort of work, provided I do not lose my life, or my health, or the best of my faculties in the interim, will probably break all records outside of a Central American revolution for quick promotion. I should probably be a brigadier general at forty, with ten or a dozen letters after my name. But if, as is likely, there is no war, I shall probably continue these little jaunts into the desert until my health gives out, when, at best, I shall be invalided home and retired on the half pay of a captain or a major.

VOL. 116-NO. 6

So, you see, my future depends entirely upon whether or not some of our neighbors, or would-be neighbors, see fit to 'start something' in this little neck of Central Asia within the next decade or two. And now that Russia is in the Entente, and we are acting so entirely in concert with her in Persia, I'm very much afraid that it's going to be a case of the 'hope deferred which maketh the heart sick.'

II

The following day we caught the river steamer at Bassorah, and four days later arrived at Bagdad, F putting up at the grim brown fort which housed the British Consulate, post office, and telegraph station. I saw him on and off for a week, usually at tiffins or dinners given for him by some of his British friends. At other times he was not to be found. 'FSahib gone to bazaar,' his Pathan bearer invariably answered my inquiries; and F— himself volunteered no more than that he was spending a good deal of time 'renewing old acquaintances.' Then, at the end of about ten days, without a good-bye to anybody, so far as I could learn, he dropped from sight. 'F is off again to his Arabs,' said his friends.

'I am much relieved,' the Consul whispered to me. "They hung on him like leeches this time, but F-got away by togging up as an Armenian arabana driver when they were expecting him as an Arab. The Armenian came here, Fstained his face, got

into the chap's clothes, and actually drove the arabana, with a load of passengers, to Kerbela. The Turks nabbed the real driver when they caught him going out on foot, but got little out of him, and I don't think they know yet exactly what happened. F is far into the desert by this time.'