rrower stage, have a place with those other captains of
their race--Hannibal, Bar-Cochab, Khalid, Amr, Saad,[3] and Mothanna.
The very spirit of war seems to shape their poetry from the first chant
for the defeat of Egypt to that last song of constancy in overthrow, of
unconquerable resolve and sure vengeance, a march music befitting Judas
Maccabaeus and his men, beside which all other war-songs, even the
"Marseillaise," appear of no account--the _Al Naharoth Babel_--"Let my
sword-hand forget, if I forget thee, O Jerusalem"--passing from the
mood of pity through words that are like the flash of spears to a
rapture of revenge known only to the injured spirits of the great when
baulked of their God-appointed fate. Yet on the shores of the Western
Sea the career of this race abruptly ends, as if in Palestine they
found a Capua, as the Crusaders long afterwards, Templars and
Hospitallers, found in that languid air, the Syrian clime, a Capua.
Thus the Hebrews missed the world-empire which the Arabs gained, but
even out of their despair created another empire, the empire of
thought; and the power to found this empire, whether expressed in the
character of their warriors, or in that unparalleled conviction which
marks the Hebrew in the remotest lands and most distant centuries, the
certainty of his return, the refusal, unyielding, to believe that he
has missed the great meed which, there in Palestine, there in the Capua
of his race, seemed within his grasp, but attests further that it is in
no lust for territory that these wars originate.

In the historical and speculative literature of Hellas and Rome war
occupies a position essentially identical with that which it occupies
in the Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the
pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit
of subjecting all things--art, statesmanship, poetry--to ethics,
regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against
the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is
divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the
life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness
in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which
cannot quit itself greatly in war will achieve nothing great in peace.
"The slave," he bitterly remarks, "knows no leisure, and the State
which sets peace above war is in the condition of a slave." Aristotle
d