TEE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 299 



a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed 

 anywhere in their neighborhood. 



The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that 

 the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through 

 war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and 

 ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a 

 more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is 

 no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men now are proud 

 of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay 

 down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off 

 subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one's country 

 may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be 

 regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why 

 should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a 

 collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush 

 with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any 

 way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this 

 civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark till the 

 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 grasped 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- 



