Miscellaneous Pamphlets (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Miscellaneous Pamphlets<br/><br/>Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite for plunder.<br/><br/>Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war-taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.<br/><br/>History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism - war for war's sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading, because of the irrationality of it all - save for the purpose of making "history" - and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen.<br/><br/>Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war, for example, the Athenians ask the inhabitants of Melos (the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found, hitherto neutral, to own their lordship.<br/><br/>About the Publisher<br/><br/>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br/><br/>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.