They will fight on provocation, and the degree of provocation required to upset the serenity of these sportsmanlike modern peoples is a point on which the shrewdest guesses may diverge.

Still, opinion runs more and more consistently to the effect that if these modern--say the French and the English-speaking--peoples were left to their own devices the peace might fairly be counted on to be kept between them indefinitely, barring unforeseen contingencies.
Experience teaches that warlike enterprise on a moderate scale and as a side interest is by no means incompatible with such a degree of neutral animus as these peoples have yet acquired,--e.g., the Spanish-American war, which was made in America, or the Boer war, which was made in England.

But these wars, in spite of the dimensions which they presently took on, were after all of the nature of episodes,--the one chiefly an extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing.
Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the deliberate and cordial support of the community at large.

There is a meretricious air over both; and there is apparent a popular inclination to condone rather than to take pride in these _faits accomplis_.

The one excursion was a product of sportsmanlike bravado, fed on boyish exuberance, fomented for mercenary objects by certain business interests and place-hunting politicians, and incited by meretricious newspapers with a view to increase their circulation.