THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 301 



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." 1 



Wells adds 2 that he thinks that the conceptions of order and dis- 

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

 stinted exertion and universal responsibility, which universal military 

 duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent acqui- 

 sition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks that 

 celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be simply 

 preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and 

 standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the 

 fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is 

 fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make 

 us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges 

 of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public opinion 

 which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference between the 

 mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's party on the 

 Congo with their cannibal war-cry of "meat! meat" and that of the 

 "general staff" of any civilized nation. History has seen the latter 

 interval bridged over: the former one can be bridged over much more 

 easily.' — William James in the Populae Science Monthly for Octo- 

 ber, 1910. 



WAR AND MANHOOD 



THOSE who fall in war are the young men of the nations, the men 

 between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, without blemish so 

 far as may be — the men of courage, alertness, dash and recklessness, 

 the men who value their lives as naught in the service of the nation. 

 The man who is left is for better and for worse the reverse of all this, 

 and it is he who determines what the future of the nation shall be. 



However noble, encouraging, inspiring, the history of modern 

 Europe may be, it is not the history we should have the right to expect 

 from the development of its racial elements. It is not the history that 

 would have been made by these same elements released from the shadow 



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

 2 Ibid., p. 226. 



