In Scotland one
remembers how half a dozen centuries ago one clan was continually
fighting with another, this group of clans warring with that, or all
were leagued together against one Edward or another advancing with his
archers from beyond the Tweed. The English armies fighting at Falkirk
and Bannockburn and Halidon were straightway--they or their
successors--in France fighting at Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt. The
wars between England and France were interminable; and so were the wars
between France and other nations. There were civil wars and religious
wars and wars of succession; seven-years wars and thirty-years wars and
hundred-years wars. War was the regular vocation of nations, the
profession of arms the chief profession, peace merely an occasional
respite, in no sense to be reckoned on or presumed to endure as the
natural condition of things.
All this has been fundamentally changed. Europe bends under the burden
of her great armies and multiplies her costly battleships, and we say
that it is wasteful and barbarous; but the soldiers and ships are almost
never used.
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