Essays in War-Time | Page 5

bug)--and they flourish near
together in many countries, though not with equal success, for while in
England the Oriental is most prosperous, in America the German
cockroach is most abundant. They are seldom found in actual
association, each is best adapted to a particular environment; there is no
reason to suppose that they fight. It is so throughout Nature. Animals
may utilise other species as food; but that is true of even, the most
peaceable and civilised human races. The struggle for existence means
that one species is more favoured by circumstances than another
species; there is not the remotest resemblance anywhere to human
warfare.
We may pass on to the second claim for war: that it is an essential
factor in the social development of primitive human races. War has no
part, though competition has a very large part, in what we call
"Nature." But, when we come to primitive man the conditions are
somewhat changed; men, unlike the lower animals, are able to form
large communities--"tribes," as we call them--with common interests,
and two primitive tribes can come into a competition which is acute to
the point of warfare because being of the same, and not of two different,
species, the conditions of life which they both demand are identical;
they are impelled to fight for the possession of these conditions as
animals of different species are not impelled to fight. We are often told
that animals are more "moral" than human beings, and it is largely to
the fact that, except under the immediate stress of hunger, they are
better able to live in peace with each other, that the greater morality of
animals is due. Yet, we have to recognise, this mischievous tendency to

warfare, so often (though by no means always, and in the earliest stages
probably never) found in primitive man, was bound up with his
superior and progressive qualities. His intelligence, his quickness of
sense, his muscular skill, his courage and endurance, his aptitude for
discipline and for organisation--all of them qualities on which
civilisation is based--were fostered by warfare. With warfare in
primitive life was closely associated the still more fundamental art,
older than humanity, of dancing. The dance was the training school for
all the activities which man developed in a supreme degree--for love,
for religion, for art, for organised labour--and in primitive days dancing
was the chief military school, a perpetual exercise in mimic warfare
during times of peace, and in times of war the most powerful stimulus
to military prowess by the excitement it aroused. Not only was war a
formative and developmental social force of the first importance among
early men, but it was comparatively free from the disadvantages which
warfare later on developed; the hardness of their life and the obtuseness
of their sensibility reduced to a minimum the bad results of wounds and
shocks, while their warfare, being free from the awful devices due to
the devilry of modern man, was comparatively innocuous; even if very
destructive, its destruction was necessarily limited by the fact that those
accumulated treasures of the past which largely make civilisation had
not come into existence. We may admire the beautiful humanity, the
finely developed social organisation, and the skill in the arts attained by
such people as the Eskimo tribes, which know nothing of war, but we
must also recognise that warfare among primitive peoples has often
been a progressive and developmental force of the first importance,
creating virtues apt for use in quite other than military spheres.[2]
The case is altered when we turn from savagery to civilisation. The new
and more complex social order while, on the one hand, it presents
substitutes for war in so far as war is a source of virtues, on the other
hand, renders war a much more dangerous performance both to the
individual and to the community, becoming indeed, progressively more
dangerous to both, until it reaches such a climax of world-wide injury
as we witness to-day. The claim made in primitive societies that
warfare is necessary to the maintenance of virility and courage, a claim
so fully admitted that only the youth furnished with trophies of heads or

scalps can hope to become an accepted lover, is out of date in
civilisation. For under civilised conditions there are hundreds of
avocations which furnish exactly the same conditions as warfare for the
cultivation of all the manly virtues of enterprise and courage and
endurance, physical or moral. Not only are these new avocations
equally potent for the cultivation of virility, but far more useful for the
social ends of civilisation. For these ends warfare is altogether less
adapted than it is for the social ends of savagery. It is much less
congenial to the tastes and aptitudes of the individual, while at the same