d that year when I was in London, beside the
routine of my office, and now I undertook its completion for the
personal pleasure which it gave me to gather into concise form the
result of some years of study and patient digging for facts in
forgotten volumes and manuscripts. The result was surprising. The
book, offered to a publisher with diffident apology, raised a storm of
discussion in a half-dozen languages. To me it had been only a
pleasant intellectual exercise to trace "the habit of war" back to the
simple animal instincts of our ancestors; to follow the changing
methods of fighting from the days when men assailed one another with
stone axes to the modern expression of fighting intelligence in the
battleship; to show how, with every step which we had taken to
eradicate disease and alleviate suffering, we had taken two in refining
and organizing our power of destruction. I had facts and figures to
mark the steps in this twofold human progress, and to show the cost to
the race of a single century not only of warring, but of following the
sage injunction to be prepared for war in times of peace. Had I closed
my labor there, the book would have been lost on the shop-shelves; but
writing ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of
the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental
passion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a
method of inversion, peppering my argument with platitudes on war as a
needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fortitude
and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what
I had intended as subtle irony was discovered by a great conservative
journal to be an unassailable argument, supported by facts and figures,
demonstrating the futility of the movements for international amity. I
was hailed as a bold, clear thinker who had pricked the bubble of
unintelligent altruism, who at a time when philanthropists were
preaching disarmament had proved that men could never disarm as long as
they were born with arms, legs and healthy senses.

So David Malcolm was quite unexpectedly raised to some eminence by a
conservative English journal which was clamoring for increased naval
expenditure; and once discovered, he found himself not without honor in
his own country, for he was assailed from the platform of Carnegie Hall
by the advocates of a gentle life, and in Congress his work was used as
a text-book