o speak most
fluently for the necessity of war, and for its merits as a needed
discipline in the manly virtues, are constrained by the prevailing
sentiment to deprecate its necessity.

Yet it is equally evident that when once a warlike enterprise has been
entered upon so far as to commit the nation to hostilities, it will have
the cordial support of popular sentiment even if it is patently an
aggressive war. Indeed, it is quite a safe generalisation that when
hostilities have once been got fairly under way by the interested
statesmen, the patriotic sentiment of the nation may confidently be
counted on to back the enterprise irrespective of the merits of the
quarrel. But even if the national sentiment is in this way to be counted
in as an incidental matter of course, it is also to be kept in mind in
this connection that any quarrel so entered upon by any nation will
forthwith come to have the moral approval of the community. Dissenters
will of course be found, sporadically, who do not readily fall in with
the prevailing animus; but as a general proposition it will still hold
true that any such quarrel forthwith becomes a just quarrel in the eyes
of those who have so been committed to it.

A corollary following from this general theorem may be worth noting in
the same connection. Any politician who succeeds in embroiling his
country in a war, however nefarious, becomes a popular hero and is
reputed a wise and righteous statesman, at least for the time being.
Illustrative instances need perhaps not, and indeed can not gracefully,
be named; most popular heroes and reputed statesmen belong in this
class.

Another corollary, which bears more immediately on the question in hand,
follows also from the same general proposition: Since the ethical values
involved in any given international contest are substantially of the
nature of afterthought or accessory, they may safely be left on one side
in any endeavour to understand or account for any given outbreak of
hostilities. The moral indignation of both parties to the quarrel is to
be taken for granted, as being the statesman's chief and necessary ways
and means of bringing any warlike enterprise to a head and floating it
to a creditable finish. It is a precipitate of the partisan animosity
that inspires both parties and holds them to their duty of
self-sacrifice and devastation, and at its best it will chiefly serve as
a cloak of self-righteousness to extenuate any exceptionall