true military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of
attack; not in waging war, but being able to wage it; and has gone on
her true mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the
whole, and more humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering
only when it was necessary to put down the lawlessness of the savage
few for the well-being of the civilised many. This has been her
idea; she may have confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese
wars; for who can always be true to the light within him? But this
has been her idea; and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a
virgin land for now eight hundred years.

But a fancy has come over us during the last blessed forty years of
unexampled peace, from which our ancestors of the sixteenth century
were kept by stern and yet most wholesome lessons; the fancy that
peace, and not war, is the normal condition of the world. The fancy
is so fair that we blame none who cherish it; after all they do good
by cherishing it; they point us to an ideal which we should otherwise
forget, as Babylon, Rome, France in the seventeenth century, forgot
utterly. Only they are in haste (and pardonable haste too) to
realise that ideal, forgetting that to do so would be really to stop
short of it, and to rest contented in some form of human society far
lower than that which God has actually prepared for those who love
Him. Better to believe that all our conceptions of the height to
which the human race might attain are poor and paltry compared with
that toward which God is guiding it, and for which he is disciplining
it by awful lessons: and to fight on, if need be, ruthless, and yet
full of pity--and many a noble soul has learnt within the last two
years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that seeming paradox of
words--smiting down stoutly evil wheresoever we shall find it, and
saying, 'What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know: but that