THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 409 



an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its 

 way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames 

 of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of 

 organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other 

 just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question 

 of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing 

 historic opportunities. 



The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous 

 honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical 

 men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree 

 of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory 

 service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, 

 and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without 

 humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed hence- 

 forward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the 

 military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the center of the situation. 

 " In many ways," he says, " military organization is the most peaceful 

 of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of 

 clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and 

 intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher 

 social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infi- 

 nitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung 

 out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work 

 for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. 

 Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness, 

 and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endow- 

 ment of research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at 

 profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the 

 steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and 

 military affairs ! Nothing is more striking than to compare the prog- 

 ress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the 

 trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. 

 The house-appliances of to-day, for example, are little better than they 

 were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, 

 badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the 

 house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satis- 

 factory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the 

 rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior 

 to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one 

 has a use now for such superannuated things." 3 



Wells adds 4 that he thinks that the conceptions of order and dis- 

 cipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, un- 



3 "First and Last Things," 1908, p. 215. 

 4 Ibid., p. 226. 

 vol.. lxxvii.— 28. 



