Statistics of eugenics and proofs that war ruins business
will not yet cure us of our habit of war, and not at all so long as
there is a vacancy in life which only the dramatic experiences of war
can fill. When war is abandoned, it will be given up probably not
because economists and sociologists vote against k, and we see that
peace is good, but by the consent of a world which, once for all, is
willing to renounce something that is dear to it and held to be good,
if for no other reason, because it symbolizes what life and reality
are. The world appears to have two minds about war, or at least it
does not hold consistently to any one attitude toward it. Beneath all
judgments about the evils of war, there is the allurement of these
aesthetic motives which must be reckoned with in any psychology of
war, or in any practical plan for eliminating war from the future
experience of the race.

CHAPTER V

PATRIOTISM, NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL HONOR

Many authors find in patriotism or in national honor the chief or the
sole cause of war. Jones (37), the Freudian, for example, says that
patriotism is the sum of those causes of war which are conscious as
distinguished from the repressed motives. Nicolai (79) says that
patriotism and chauvinism would have no meaning and no interest
without reference to war, and that for the arts of peace one needs no
patriotism at all. Hoesch-Ernst (32), another German writer, says that
patriotism has made history a story of wars. It has developed the
highest virtues (and the worst vices), but it creates artificial
boundaries among peoples, and gives to every fighter the belief that
he is contending against brute force. Veblen (97) says that patriotism
is the only obstacle to peace among the nations. MacCurdy (37) speaks
of the paradox of human nature seen in the fact that the loyalty we
call patriotism, which may make a man a benefactor to the whole race,
may become a menace to mankind when it is narrowly focussed. Novicow
says that what shall be foreign is a purely conventional matter.
Another writer remarks that patriotism is the guise under which the
instincts of tiger and wolf run riot.

Several writers, Powers (75), and especially Veblen, place questions
of national honor among the main causes of war. Veblen would hold that
wars never occur unless the questions involved are first converted
into questions of national honor--and are then, but only then,
supported as moral issues. Oth