If it were not useful in explaining our principal idea to apply it successively to individual cases, it would not be essential to the present inquiry, to make any reference to the subject of security against foreign enemies. But this digression is the less regrettable, so long as I confine my attention to the influence of war on national character, taking the point of view that I have chosen as the guiding principle of the whole inquiry.

Now, regarded in this light, war seems to be one of the most salutary phenomena for the culture of human nature; and it is not without regret that I see it disappearing more and more from the scene. It is the fearful extremity through which all that active courage—all that endurance and fortitude are steeled and tested, which afterwards achieve such varied results in the ordinary conduct of life, and which alone give it that strength and diversity, without which facility is weakness, and unity is inanity.

It may, perhaps, be argued that there are other means of achieving this—that there are many kinds of activity full of physical danger, and, if I may be allowed the expression, moral dangers also, which beset the firm, unfaltering statesman in the council room, and the free-spirited thinker in his solitary cell. But I cannot divest myself of the belief, that as everything spiritual is only a finer development of the physical, so it is in this case.