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Show with steel, or shatter their faces with devilish explosives, as in this twentieth century of the Christian era. . Now, whatever be the rights or wrongs of war, one thing seems clear. Mom‘ in" The weapons are wrong. My young friend, With his fine-spun brain and his spiritual delight in Milton's harmonics, ought not to be annihilated by a piece of raw matter. One does not fight a Sevres vase With a stone. up your Chinese vase an you will, and let the battle be of beauty. Bring There is a horrible expression, " food for powder "-you Will find it in all'languages that are really civilised. It implies that the masses are so_ coarse in texture, are carcasses so gross and sub-human, that their best use is to be thrown to the guns-a providential fire-screen for the finer classes. Democracy will in due time take note of this conception. But in its rude way the phrase shadows forth a truth-the truth that, for all who have passed beyond the animal stage, the war of tooth and claw is antiquated. Our war, if war there be, must be conducted with weapons suitable to the dignity of the super-beast who has been so laboriously evolved, suitable to the spirit which through innumerable aeons has been winning its way through the welter of brute impulses. Not for man the slaver of the serpent, the fangs of the tiger. And shelling is only the ejection of a deadlier slaver, the bayonet only a fiercer fang. It seems futile to have evolved from the brute if our brain-power only makes us bigger brutes. " The man behind the gun "- a i 5-inch gun that hurls a ton of metal for twelve miles-is a wilder and more monstrous beast than ever appeared even in the antediluvian epoch, and that he should not be kept safely stuffed in a museum like the pterodactyl is an intolerable anachronism. A world in which with one movement of his paw he can kill off a whole congregation of Milton-worshippers is a world which should have been nipped in the nebula. No, if fighting there must be, let my young friend fight against Nietzsche-worshippers-let the lucid lines of the Puritan poet confound the formless squadrons of the Pagan dithyrambist. Brain against brain, soul against soul, thought against thought, art against art, man, in short, against man-there lies the fight of the future. If my young friend were a man of science, he would be kept awake not by the German torpedoes but by the German treatises : were he only a tailor, he should never throw away his yard-stick for a lance but with his good old scissors cut out the Teutonic tailor. After such civilised fashion, indeed, the Anglo-German contest has long been raging, and the German has been winning all along the line. His patience, his industry, his nice study of his customers, has everywhere swept the Englishman aside. Before his music the Briton fell-in worship ; his drama invaded us triumphantly. Why was Germany not content with this victorious campaign, with this campaign worthy of human beings? German influence, German Kultur-it is spread by peace, not by the sword. To German Universities shoals of Russian students flocked as to shrines, humble feudatories of German scholarship, German thoroughness. TO tlée barbarous regions, where an Ovid might still lament his exile, they I 4 , ploramfinnocfe, ' (Levy/nae cjus lvll 3.4 omma A." r, 11)‘ BERNARD PARTRIDGE m p , {a bGLGlQHi:: 192+, |