The greatest of all discouragements of modern life is that of the terrific evolution of war, throughout recent history, and even of well-nigh universal threatenings of a fresh climax utterly surpassing the recent one. On the one side every War Office is busy with the basest thinkable perversions of growing command of nature, as with gases and germs, to be used, by turn or together, for the doom of cities, the destruction even of life over whole regions. Where war preparations go on, there are no less poisonous perversions of truth, such as war is an essential element of human nature, while on the opposite side people have still, even from the League of Nations, the Peace Societies, or their public of goodwill, no adequate sociological inquiry into the conditions evolving wars. But whoever cares to give thought and observation to rural occupations in his own western country, or still better in the older and gentler ones of China or of India, can see that the contact of such peasant folk with war has arisen from aggression by hunter or nomad, trader or pirate, or by the varied combination of these, more or less, as mis-rulers.