1 8 The Philosophy of Force 



The philosophy of force ^ has been admirably 

 interpreted by Professor WilUam James" in the 

 following passage : 



The war party is assuredly right in affirming and 

 re-affirming that the martial virtues, although origin- 

 ally gained by the race through war, are absolute and 

 permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambi- 

 tion in their military form are, after all, only specifica- 

 tions of a more general competitive passion. . . . 

 Pacificism makes no converts from the military party. 

 The military party denies neither the bestiality, nor 

 the horror, nor the expense; it only says that these 

 things tell but half the story. It only says that war is 

 worth them; that, taking human nature as a whole, 

 its wars are its best protection against its weaker and 

 more cowardly self, and that mankind cannot afford 

 to adopt a peace economy. . . . Militarism is the 

 great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human 

 life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. 

 . . . This natural sort of feeling forms, I think, the 

 innermost soul of army-writings. Without any excep- 



* For other militaristic expressions of the philosophy of force 

 see Admiral Mahan, The Place of Power in International Relations, 

 in the North American Review for January, 1912, and such books 

 as Professor Spenser Wilkinson's The Great Alternative, Britain at 

 Bay, War and Policy; see also the recent work of an American, 

 General Homer Lea, The Valor of Ignorance, with its introduction 

 by another American soldier, General John J. P. Storey. In 

 German see S. R. Steinmetz, Philosophie des Krieges; Clauss 

 Wagner, Der Krieg ah Schaffendes Weltprinzip; and in French, 

 Colonel Arthur Boucher, La France Victorieuse dans la Guerre 

 de Demain, and M. Keller, La Guerre de Demain. 



' The Moral Equivalent of War (Am. Assn. for International 

 Conciliation, February, 1910). 



