Such statecraft may perhaps seem rude and barbarous to us.
The idea of a nation as a system of classes, and of national unity as a
condition only to be realised when all classes combine for some purpose
extraneous to the everyday life of the nation, is foreign to our thought. We
believe that by making war upon class privileges we have given to the State a less
divided and more organic character. We maintain that the State exists to
realise an immanent ideal, which we express by some such formula as "the
greatest good of the greatest number." But we are still so far from a
reconciliation of facts with theories that we must hesitate before utterly
condemning the medieval attitude towards war. In place of classes we have
interests, which are hard to unite and often at open variance.
Our statesmen
balance one interest against another, and consider war legitimate when it
offers great advantages to the interests most worth conciliating. Nor have we
yet succeeded in giving to the average citizen so elevated a conception of the
purpose for which the State exists that he can think of national policy as
something different from national selfishness. It is easier to criticise the
enthusiasts who urged medieval nations to undertake "some work of noble
note," remote from daily routine, than it is to discover and to preach a
nobler enterprise on behalf of a less visionary ideal. It helps us to understand,
though it does not compel us to accept, the medieval theory, when we find
modern poets and preachers glorifying war as a school of patriotism or of
national character.
