ocesses of war are primitive, the causes of war are no less so.
It has been strikingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar that
"language was born in the courting-days of mankind: the first utterance
of speech <was> something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the
tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father
of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade
is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two cock-pheasants for
the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its primal
manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the
hell-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the
noblest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature.
Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed,
consecration to country, fine words all, fine things, but so many of the
men who represent these fine things perish. It wrings the heart at a
distance of more than thirty years to think of those who have fallen,
and love still maintains passionately that they were the best. At any
rate, they were among the best, and both sides are feeling the loss to
this day, not only in the men themselves, but in the sons that should
have been born to them.

Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient number of resemblances, in
killed, wounded, and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, or, if
you choose to give it a milder name, rivalry. These things are of the
essence of war, and the manifestations run parallel even in the finer
lines. One cock-pheasant finds the drumming of another cock-pheasant a
very irritating sound, Chanticleer objects to the note of Chanticleer,
and the more articulate human being is rasped by the voice of his
neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad Boeotian speech. Parson
Evans's "seese and putter" were the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's
dose of humiliation. "Yankee twang" and "Southern drawl" incited as well
as echoed hostility.

[Note: Ach. 527.]

Borderers are seldom friends. "An Attic neighbor" is a Greek proverb.
Kentucky and Ohio frown at each other across the river. Cincinnati looks
down on Covington, and Covington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in
his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian war to a kidnapping affair
between Athens and Megara. The underground railroad preceded the
aboveground railroad in the history of the great American conflict.

There were je