There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however,
these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as
they obtained collective possessions--flocks and pastures and hunting
grounds--they came into collision with each other, and all the old
pugnacity of the beast awoke. Skill, and even ferocity, in war became a
valuable social quality, and we get the stage of the savage. The
barbarian, or the man between savagery and civilisation, was still
compelled to fight for his possessions. He was usually surrounded by
fierce savage tribes. The civilised man in turn was surrounded by
savages and barbarians, and needed to fight. So through thousands of
years of development of moral sentiment and legal procedure the
primitive method of the beast has been preserved.
But I am not writing a history of warfare, and need not describe these
stages more closely, or examine the new sentiment of imperialist
expansion which gave civilisations a fresh incentive to develop methods
of warfare. The point of interest is to determine at what stage it might
have been possible for the moral element to intervene and bid the
warriors, in the name of humanity, lay down their arms; at what stage
the tribunal which men had set up to adjudicate between the quarrels of
individuals might have been enlarged so as to be capable of arbitrating
on the quarrels of nations.
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