The Lesson of History 145 



direct result of the operation of continuous warfare 

 upon the condition of the people. It must always 

 mean the frustration of democracy. " Ethics must 

 needs worsen throughout the State when the primitive 

 instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder ; 

 and worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a 

 society's total strength." 1 Similarly with the Greek 

 civilisation. " Even the sinister virtue of uniting a 

 people within itself was lacking to the perpetual war- 

 fare of the Greek ; the internal hatreds seem posi- 

 tively to worsen in the atmosphere of the hatreds of 

 the communities." 2 That Aristotle had realised the 

 danger of continuous conflict he shows by an apt 

 quotation from his " Politics." " As he (Aristotle) 

 profoundly observes, the training of a people to war 

 ends in their ruin, even when they acquire supremacy, 

 because their legislators have not taught them how to 

 rest." 3 In a chapter on " Feudal England," Robertson 

 asserts that " nothing can hinder that foreign wars 

 shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the 

 lower classes, developing as they do the relation of 

 subjection, and setting up the spirit of force as against 

 the spirit of law. . . . No nation, from Rome to 

 Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture 

 by destroying other States." 4 



The case of Turkey lends ample confirmation if any 

 were needed to the position taken up by Robertson, 

 and Angell has made striking use of it in demonstrating 

 the evils of continuous conflict. For four hundred 

 years it has lived on this alone, extracting tribute from 

 the subject Christian populations without any pre- 

 tence whatever of government, administration, or pro- 

 tection, while the Turkish people themselves, unfit for 

 anything but physical conflict, degenerated in every 



1 Robertson, " Evolution of States." 2 Ibid. 



3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 



