THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 407 
advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of 
the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due 
to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable 
criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole 
nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellec- 
tual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes 
absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant am- 
bitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must 
make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should 
not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look forward to 
a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as between civil- 
ized peoples. 
All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist 
party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be 
permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized preserve 
some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful 
peace-economy can not be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or 
less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must 
still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to 
our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make 
new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the mili- 
tary mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring 
cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, 
obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states 
are built—unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against com- 
monwealths fit only for contempt, and lable to invite attack whenever 
a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed 
anywhere in their neighborhood. 
The war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that 
the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through 
war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and 
ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a 
more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is 
no reason for supposing them to be its last form. Men now are proud 
of belonging to a conquering nation, and without a murmur they lay 
down their persons and their wealth, if by so doing they may fend off 
subjection. But who can be sure that other aspects of one’s country 
may not, with time and education and suggestion enough, come to be 
regarded with similarly effective feelings of pride and shame? Why 
should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood-tax to belong to a 
collectivity superior in any ideal respect? Why should they not blush 
with indignant shame if the community that owns them is vile in any 
way whatsoever? Individuals, daily more numerous, now feel this 
civic passion. It is only a question of blowing on the spark till the 
