.
"People give up their comfort, their careers, they go to face the last
risk--is that nothing?"

"No," said Father Payne; "it is a very magnificent and splendid thing,--I
don't deny that. But even so, that can't be preserved artificially. I mean
that no one would think that, if there were no chance of a real war, it
would be a good thing to evoke such self-sacrifice by having manoeuvres in
which the best youth of the country were pitted against each other, to kill
each other if possible. There must be a _real_ cause behind it. No one
would say it was a noble thing for the youth of a country to fling
themselves down over a cliff or to infect themselves with leprosy to show
that they could despise suffering and death. If it were possible to settle
the differences between nations without war, war would be a wholly evil
thing. The only thing that one can say is that while there exists a strong
nation which believes enough in war to make war aggressively, other nations
are bound to resist it. But the nation which believes in war is _ipso
facto_ an uncivilised nation."

"But does not a war," said Lestrange, "clear the air, and take people away
from petty aims and trivial squabbles into a sterner and larger
atmosphere?"

"Yes, I think it does," said Father Payne; "but a great pestilence might do
that. We might be thankful for all the good we could get out of a
pestilence, and be grateful for it; but we should never dream of
artificially renewing it for that reason. I look upon war as a sort of
pestilence, a contagion which spreads under certain conditions. But we
disguise the evil of it from ourselves, if we allow ourselves to believe in
its being intrinsically glorious. I can't believe that highway robbery has
only to be organised on a sufficiently large scale to make it glorious. A
man who resists highway robbery, and runs the risk of death, because he
wants to put a stop to it, seems to me a noble person--quite different from
the man who sees a row going on and joins in it because he does not want to
be out of a good thing! Do you remember the story of the Irishman who saw a
fight proceeding, and rushed into the fray wielding his shillelagh, and
praying that it might fall on the right heads? We have all of us
uncivilised instincts, but it does not make them civilised to join with a
million other people in indulging them. I think that a man who refuses to
join from conviction, at the risk of being hooted as a coward, is p