THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 405 



does not believe that in the long run chance and luck play any part in 

 apportioning the issues. 



The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, 

 superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military competition; 

 but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the latter case, 

 makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal is com- 

 parable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men into 

 cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature ade- 

 quately develop its capacity. The only alternative is " degeneration." 



Dr. Steinmetz is a conscientious thinker, and his book, short as it 

 is, takes much into account. Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed 

 up in Simon Patten's word, that mankind was nursed in pain and 

 fear, and that the transition to a " pleasure-economy " may be fatal to 

 a being wielding no powers of defense against its disintegrative influ- 

 ences. If we speak of the fear of emancipation from the fear-regime, 

 we put the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding our- 

 selves now taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy. 



Turn the fear over as I will in my mind, it all seems to lead back 

 to two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one esthetic, and the other 

 moral : unwillingness, first to envisage a future in which army-life, 

 with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in 

 which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided quickly, 

 thrillingly and tragically, by force, but only gradually and insipidly 

 by " evolution '"' ; and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme 

 theater of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military apti- 

 tudes of men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never 

 show themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less 

 than other esthetic and ethical insistencies have, it seems to me, to be 

 listened to and respected. One can not meet them effectively by mere 

 counter-insistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The horror 

 makes the thrill ; and when the question is of getting the extremest and 

 supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. 

 The weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident — pacifi- 

 cism makes no converts from the military party. The military party 

 denies neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only 

 says that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is 

 worth them ; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best 

 protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind 

 can not afford to adopt a peace-economy. 



Pacificists ought to enter more deeply into the esthetical and ethical 

 point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy, says 

 J. J. Chapman, then move the point, and your opponent will follow. 

 So long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary 

 function, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as one might say, to 



