16 
House & Garden 
THE PRINCIPLES of 
A LMOST the first thing an artillery officer has to master is the prin- 
. ciple of indirect firing. This is shooting at an enemy he cannot 
see. It is a complicated matter of trigonometry, and has to do with 
bases of triangles, apexes, trajectories, humidity of the air and speed 
of the wind. 
Not so complicated, but no less important, is the principle of indirect 
fighting; and each of us over here has to master it. It is the art of 
destroying an enemy you cannot see. It is concerned with such com¬ 
monplace matters as dollars and cents, the morale of the home, the 
maintenance of enthusiasm and faith in the face of defeat and bitter 
loss. To master this principle requires gallantry unseen and sacrifice 
which knows no stint. 
Only a small fraction of our 100,000,000 Americans can actually 
fight the enemy face to face. Most of us must fight him indirectly, and 
we must keep on fighting until he and the things he stands for are utterly 
destroyed. 
We must do even more: we must desire the things we cherish with 
such determination that we will be willing to live for them. This is 
not a paradox. Dying for a cause has become a commonplace in these 
past five years, however heroic the death. It is actually harder to live 
for principles. And we must so live and so ingrain these principles 
into our national constitution that the men who have died for them 
shall not have died in vain. 
In that lies the hope for our greatest possible victory. A healthy 
national constitution throws off evil principles just as a healthy body 
throws off the germs of a destructive disease. It is not enough that we 
sacrifice fortunes and lives to destroy the breeding places of these evil 
principles; we must build the American life on such a foundation that 
we ourselves shall never be guilty of them. 
M OST of us are naturally wondering what will happen to the world 
after this war is over. We hear talk about a social revolution, 
about anarchy, about the destruction of 
capital. From Russia come warnings, 
some say, of what will happen here. 
This we might expect if we were Rus¬ 
sians and had lived under a government 
which sold its principles to the highest 
German bidder. But America and the 
Americans are quite a different breed, 
and what will happen here will doubtless 
be quite the opposite of what happened 
in the Russian Empire. 
At various dark times in the world’s 
history the decent things of life have 
been preserved by men and women who 
voluntarily gave up everything that made 
life pleasant and easy, and by their 
sacrifice and labors were able to snatch 
civilization from the burning. In the 
11th Century it was the men and women 
in monastic life who saved civilization 
and brought it to richer fruition. To do 
so they lived under the vows of Poverty, 
Celibacy and Obedience—the surrender 
of money, home, kin, appetites and the 
will. 
It may be difficult for us to under¬ 
stand how these men and women did any 
good by their lives of negation. The 
spirit of our age has been positivism 
rampant. We have boasted individual¬ 
ism, made possible the amassing of huge 
fortunes, and held the home ties so light¬ 
ly that Divorce was nothing unusual or 
disgraceful. Yet, the fact cannot be de¬ 
nied, that Poverty, Celibacy and Obedi¬ 
ence once saved the world,—and will save 
it again. Indeed, it is saving it today. 
For we Americans have taken those very 
vows, and by lives lived under them we 
will save the good things from the civili¬ 
zation that is passing for the civilization 
that is to come. 
Let us see what these old vows meant 
and how their modern manifestations 
are working now in the American nation. 
INDIRECT FIGHTING 
C ELIBACY meant curbing bodily desires, it meant keeping the 
flesh under subjection, in training for constant warfare, held down 
to muscle. Today we call it Hooverizing. 
Poverty in those times meant the giving up of personal wealth so 
that one would not be encumbered with money affairs, and so that such 
monies as did accrue to the monastic community could be used for the 
good of all concerned and to further the general work in which all 
were interested. Today we Americans are giving up our money in 
exactly the same spirit and with precisely the same motive. We are 
being made poor today that tomorrow’s generation shall be the richer. 
Obedience meant the surrender of the will to the head of the order. 
A religious did as he was commanded, his petty personal whims were 
not considered. His obedience presupposed his acknowledgment that 
the head of the order had the right to command and was in the best 
position to do so. Read down the parallel of Obedience today. We 
see two million of our sons under arms doing as they are bid, going 
where they are sent—and going willingly. We see the American people 
obedient to commands from the President, and whether they mean coal¬ 
less days or newsless newspapers or lightless nights, we accept them 
for the sake of the cause and as proof that we believe in the commander. 
The efficacy of these vows was that they were undertaken willingly 
and in full consciousness of what they meant. Precisely the same 
spirit and understanding obtain in America today. We know what our 
sacrifices require of us and why we are undertaking them. 
H ERE, then, is an entire nation living under the modem expression 
of monastic vows. Here is an entire nation trained to fight 
indirectly. And just as the monk never saw the devil (a few claim 
they did, however), he sought to conquer, so we at home here may never 
see the enemy against which our living is directed. 
Let us live under this regime for a time, and what man of us will 
want to return to the old manner of living? Can we not already see, 
through the chaos of the war, which way 
we are tending ? The answer to the 
question of “What will come next?” is 
found in what we are doing now. 
And what we are doing now is merely 
maintaining those principles on which 
the life of the home has always been 
built. There never was a time when the 
home was not founded on the curbing of 
desires, the surrender of personal whims 
and the giving up of material things for 
someone else. In a few sections of 
America we seemed to be fast losing sight 
of these principles. Then the war came 
and swept us like a cleansing wind, and 
we saw with a clear eye. Simplicity, 
loyalty, thrift, hard work—on these prin¬ 
ciples the domain of the home is built, 
and on these it will survive. 
These are humanizing principles, they 
reduce life to fundamentals. A nation 
that lives under them must inevitably ex¬ 
perience an improvement in every class. 
This is the answer to those who are wor¬ 
rying about what capital and labor will 
do after the war. Look at the leaven 
working now. Capital and labor are be¬ 
coming humanized. United to win a vic¬ 
tory for peace, they must remain united 
in peace that they may reap the fruits of 
that victory. Capital and labor are being 
revitalized by human fundamentals. No 
man or class can curb appetite, surrender 
wealth and subject themselves to leader¬ 
ship without having those sacrifices re¬ 
turned them in full measure. They have, 
moreover, the satisfaction of the soldier 
who fires at an enemy he cannot see: they 
know that working on the right principles 
—just as the soldier must aim his gun on 
the right angles—they inevitably will 
strike and destroy the foe. 
Isn’t this about right? Think it over 
the next time you have a quiet minute to 
yourself in the garden. 
SONG for A CHILD’S 
HOUSE 
I'm glad our house is a little house, ' w 
Not too tall nor too wide: || 
I'm glad the hovering butterflies 
Feel free to come inside. 
Our little house is a friendly house, 
It is not shy or vain; 
It gossips with the talking trees, 
And makes friends with the rain. 
And quick leaves cast a shimmer of 
green 
Against our whited walls, 
And in the phlox, the courteous bees 
Are paying duty calls. 
Christopher Morley 
