LAiM) AND WATER. 
July 3, 1915. 
THE IDEALS OF WAR. 
AN INTRODUCTION. 
By L. March Phillipps. 
THE object of tliis, and perhaps of some following 
essays, wiU be to attempt a definition of the inward 
motives and ideas which are contending in the 
the present war. These give war its meaning. 
The outward act of war is always brutal, but as 
Ihe phy.=ical aspect of a struggle of ideals it may be illumined 
and made splendid. Widely indeed are those mistaken who 
proclaim war's stupidity. The wars of savages are stupid, 
because they are about nothing that matters, but the wars 
of civihsed nations— wars waged to determine whether a 
higher or lower philosopliy of life shall preside over the 
future of the race, so far from being stupid, are among the 
most profoundly int-eresting and significant events in history. 
They are, in fact, what Shakespeare is fond of calling them, 
the mighty arguments which, in their results, govern the 
destinies of mankind. It is thus in the long run we judge 
them. Why do the names of Marathon and Thermopyte 
shine through the ages like stars? Because on those fields 
there met in visible combat two principles of eternal 
significance. Because it was not Greek and Persian who 
fo'iight those battles, but European liberty and Oriental 
despotism. Every soldier of Darius and Xerxes was dimly 
inspired by the hate which the passive East bears to the active 
West. They had their own " Kultur " to preach to the 
savages and pirates of the Greek islands. And so, too, every 
free-born Greek, as he leapt at the invader, was fired by the 
thought of the Greek love of liberty and the Greek citizen- 
ship wiiose representative and champion he was. Only people 
whose eyes see what is outward but whose minds cannot grasp 
what is inward grudge the blood which is shed in such a 
cause. But I ask the reader what should wo understand of 
those actions — actions by which Western civilisation and the 
whole trend of Western thought were secured, and in whose 
after effects we are still all of us living to this day — 
if all we saw in them was a certain number of Greeks and 
Persians hacking and stabbing each other- with spears and 
arrows ? 
And so, too, what do we understand of the present war 
while we fix our gaze on the visible armies engaged, 
unless, while we watch them, we realise the ideas they 
represent and whose struggle is their struggle ? It was 
not Greek or Persian that mattered in those long-ago 
engagements; but the theories of life for which they stood; 
and neither, to the world and to the future, is it Englishman 
or Austrian, French or German, which matters now, but the 
theories of life for which these, too, stand. This is our 
concern. We want to look at the war, if we can, in the light 
of history, tracing in it the victory or defeat, not of brief- 
lived human beings, but of thoughts whose influence is to 
pass on through the centuries of the future. The two orders 
or ideas, Western and Eastern, for which Greek and Persian 
fought, stand out now distinctly enough though all that was 
visible in that quarrel has long since faded away. And the 
time will also come when all that is mortal of the present 
conflict, armies and guns, and tactics and strategy, will be 
reduced to conflicting legends for historians to squabble 
over; but, with the passing of all we know it by, 
the truth about the war will but emerge the clearer, for 
to the victory of one or other of the ideals now fighting for 
supremacy the men and women of the future will owe the 
lives they live and the thoughts they think. 
How, then, shall we lay hold of the thoughts, the 
theories of life as I have called them, whose invisible war 
the visible war symbolises? In an essay, intended but to 
hint at the nature of the subject, we must not expect more 
than briefly to indicate the conflicting principles. This, 
however, we may attempt. 
It will be conceded by many, and will be made clearer, 
perhaps, by and by, that the principle which is more and 
more gaining a hold on European life, and is tending to 
harmonise the ideals and reconcile the endeavours of°tha 
European nations, is that principle of liberty which ensures 
to every national entity its right to be itself and to develop 
its character and individuality by the free growth of its own 
qualities and characteristics. Professor Sarolea, in a book 
which most people have been reading lately, has an interest- 
ing chapter on this modem, as it may be called, theory of 
freely formed national character, and the wonderful results, 
b richness and diversity, attained by a system which utilises 
the various contributions of all peoples. Ifc is a thought 
which concerns us English people closely, for there is none 
which has more intimately directed our own policy and th« 
growth of our Empire. But it concerns other nations also. 
It is tending to-day to be accepted as a European philosophy 
of life, and it is fraught with intellectual and spiritual coa- 
sequences which are of absolutely first-rate importance to th« 
future of mankind. 
By and by, perhaps, we shall see how this motiv* 
operates, and how, especially in the Eastern and Southera 
parts of Europe, those States which feel its impulse feel it aa 
tlie touch of life itself. But now let us go on to ask the 
further question : Is Europe united in the endeavour to 
realise this ideal, or are there any dissentients among its 
nations ? The question of itself turns all eyes towards Ger- 
many. Out of Germany, and more particularly out of th« 
Northern or Prussian part of it, there does come, and in very 
clear and ringing accents, a challenge to this theory of lifa. 
Prussia may be said to have been nurtured in the idea oi 
dominion. It was the Prussian theory that development was 
to proceed by acquisition from without rather than by growth 
from within. With her the will to dominate even preceded 
the power to do so. The instinct of all babifts to grasp and 
hold fast was Prussia's in a very singular degree. Not only 
has every addition to her stature been the result of forcibi* 
appropriation, but no State has so consciously and no carefully 
cultivated the power to grasp and hold aud so consistently 
applied it. No State, as you may say, has so 
" Wrought 
Upon the plan which pleased its childish thought." 
Domination, the imposition of its own will upon others rather 
than their own free development, this Ls what has always been 
sacred in the eyes of Prussia. 
But does she stand alone ? What is the most salient of 
all facts about the government of Austria ? It is — no on* 
will deny it — that, placed as she is where many nations meeft 
and formed out of the fragments of many races, slie has not 
set to work to form an empire based on the free consent of 'ti 
component parts, but has striven to weld together, by outsida 
pressure and force, a structure of power which the very 
development of freedom itself has steadily disintegrated. 
Here was a fitting ally for Germany, an ally whose thought 
was her thought. And where in the West could a third 
be found of like calibre ? Of all nations there was on« 
which, above all others, had made the theory of domina- 
tion in its crudest form the inspiration of its policy, and 
wliich had, as it were, so incarnated that ideal that the 
casting off of its government had come to mean, for all 
incipient nationalities, the first step in the direction of free- 
dom. Turkey swiftly recognised what there was sympathetio 
to her own genius iu the German-Austrian point of view, and 
ranged herself, a solitary recruit, on the side of her spiritual 
allies. 
Thus the ill-omened trinity was formed. The differences 
between each of its members are obvious. What, you would 
ask, has progressive Germany to do with effet« Austria or 
barbarous Turkey with either? But if, instead of looking 
for differences, we look for a resemblance, we shall find all 
three strictly united in their dependence on the same 
political principle. All three, we shall find, rely on the power 
to dominate, to enforce obedience, to inflict their will on 
others. And not only is this principle common to all three, 
but it is vital to each of them. To the Prussian (for Ger- 
many in this matter takes her orders from Prussia) it is the 
gospel which is to inspire his new world-empire ; to the 
Austrian it is the tie which holds together the rather ram- 
shackle empire he already possesses; wliile to the Turk it 
stands for the only kind of empire he has ever dreamed of as 
possible. Whatever influence in life, then, threatens this 
political principle threatens the life of Prussia, Austria, and 
Turkey, and would tend to unite them against a common foe. 
While, therefore, an inquiry like the present will have to 
consider carefully this principle of domination which Prussia, 
Austria, and Turkey represent — its place in history, its 
limitations, the circumstances which have favoured its 
growth, aud chiefly the causes which have led to its adoption 
by Germany — yet the very act of doing this will help to 
separate from it and define in its turn another ideal which 
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