400 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR? 
By WILLIAM JAMES 
HE war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping 
party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate 
their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the 
glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the 
ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is some- 
thing highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war. Ask all 
our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such 
a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, 
and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted 
for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of 
eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories 
and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a 
sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. 
Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in cold blood 
to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and 
not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, 
precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake 
of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy’s 
injustice leaves us no alternative, is war now thought permissible. 
It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting 
men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the villages 
and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well as the most ex- 
citing, way of living. Thus were the more martial tribes selected, and 
in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and love of glory came to mingle 
with the more fundamental appetite for plunder. 
Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue 
to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all 
the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and 
horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. 
War is the strong life; it is life in extremis ; war-taxes are the only ones 
men never hesitate to pay; as the budgets of all nations show us. 
History is a bath of blood. The Miad is one long recital of how 
Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the 
1This article, published last February by the American Association for 
International Conciliation, is here reproduced as a tribute to the memory of 
William James. It was written at the suggestion of the editor of THE PoPULAR 
ScIENCE MONTHLY. 
