Most of the people who appear most often in glorious history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. We do not know who first launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror' or a general or a soldier. Furthermore, I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight so do savages hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently--this, after all, is what conquerors and general have done, is not being civilized. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off greater number of the other side, and then saying that the side which has killed most has won, not only that it has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right, for. that is what people going to war means it means saying that might is right. This is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. When our own age has fought the two greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets--while, that is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life--nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages. We learn from the first paragraph that ______.