cture a
British warrior of to-day in this attitude would be somewhat
far-fetched. The historian of the South African War points out, again
and again, that the British leaders showed a singular lack of the
fighting spirit. During that war English generals seldom cared to engage
the enemy's forces except when their own forces greatly outnumbered
them, and on many occasions they surrendered immediately they realized
that they were themselves outnumbered. Those reckless Englishmen who
boldly sailed out from their little island to face the Spanish Armada
were long ago exterminated; an admirably prudent and cautious race has
been left alive.

It is the same story elsewhere. The French long cherished the tradition
of military glory, and no country has fought so much. We see the result
to-day. In no country is the attitude of the intellectual classes so
calm and so reasonable on the subject of war, and nowhere is the popular
hostility to war so strongly marked.[228] Spain furnishes another instance
which is even still more decisive. The Spanish were of old a
pre-eminently warlike people, capable of enduring all hardships, never
fearing to face death. Their aggressively warlike and adventurous spirit
sent them to death all over the world. It cannot be said, even to-day,
that the Spaniards have lost their old tenacity and hardness of fibre,
but their passion for war and adventure was killed out three centuries
ago.

In all these and the like cases there has been a process of selective
breeding, eliminating the soldierly stocks and leaving the others to
breed the race. The men who so loved fighting that they fought till they
died had few chances of propagating their own warlike impulses. The men
who fought and ran away, the men who never fought at all, were the men
who created the new generation and transmitted to it their own
traditions.

This selective process, moreover, has not merely acted automatically; it
has been furthered by social opinion and social pressure, sometimes very
drastically expressed. Thus in the England of the Plantagenets there
grew up a class called "gentlemen"--not, as has sometimes been
supposed, a definitely defined class, though they were originally of
good birth--whose chief characteristic was that they were good fighting
men, and sought fortune by fighting. The "premier gentleman" of England,
according to Sir George Sitwell, and an entirely typical representative
of his class, was a certain glorio