Page:You Gentiles (1924) by Maurice Samuel 1895-1972.djvu/59

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Sport

in time of war) for the true pacifist. Your nature is to-day what it was a thousand years ago. "In the somber obstinacy of the British worker still survives the tacit rage of the Scandinavian Berserker." And vain and futile and foolish are all these efforts to dam up and to choke the extremest and most cherished outlet of your natural instinct.

But in war, as in all other games of life, you satisfy your morality by means of amazing punctilios. To kill thus leaves you clean: to kill otherwise is ungentlemanly. In a few of these fine points in the conduct of war and of duels there may lurk some true moral significance. But it amazes us that in the exercise of this punctilio you find sufficient righteousness to ease your conscience altogether.

Were you truly concerned with right and wrong instead of with the sporting "right thing," with honor, what a flood of horror and of pity and of prostration would follow each of your wars: with what frantic haste you would fly to the consolation of each other; with what tremors of moral terror

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