4 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals 

 of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself 

 up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the indi- 

 vidual as in a vise. The war-function has graspt us so far; but con- 

 structive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose 

 on the individual a hardly lighter burden. 



Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to 

 make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should 

 toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, 

 and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth 

 and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain 

 and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vaca- 

 tion, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this 

 campaigning life at all — this is capable of arousing indignation in re- 

 flective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some 

 of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly 

 ease. If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military 

 conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form 

 for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against 

 nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other 

 goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of 

 hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the 

 people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are 

 blind, to man's real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the perma- 

 nently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron 

 mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, 

 clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel- 

 making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, 

 would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get 

 the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with 

 healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their 

 blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare 

 against nature, they would tread the earth more proudly, the women 

 would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teach- 

 ers of the following generation. 



Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would 

 have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would pre- 

 serve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the 

 military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get 

 toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty 

 as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is tem- 

 porary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of 

 one's life. I spoke of the " moral equivalent " of war. So far, war has 

 been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until 



