our scientific war is an emanation from that evil panic which is
at the heart of it. The charge of the Crusades was a charge;
it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver.
The charge of the modern armaments is not a charge at all.
It is a rout, a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will catch
the hindmost. It is impossible to imagine a mediaeval knight
talking of longer and longer French lances, with precisely
the quivering employed about larger and larger German ships The
man who called the Blue Water School the "Blue Funk School"
uttered a psychological truth which that school itself would
scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-power standard,
if it be a necessity, is in a sense a degrading necessity.
Nothing has more alienated many magnanimous minds from Imperial
enterprises than the fact that they are always exhibited as stealthy
or sudden defenses against a world of cold rapacity and fear.
The Boer War, for instance, was colored not so much by the creed
that we were doing something right, as by the creed that Boers
and Germans were probably doing something wrong; driving us
(as it was said) to the sea. Mr. Chamberlain, I think,
said that the war was a feather in his cap and so it was:
a white feather.

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic
armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society.
The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense
of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.
It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words
of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week.
And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation
for futurity Futurity does not exist, because it is still future.