3oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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 

 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 



