408 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
whole population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals 
of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds itself 
up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the indi- 
vidual as in a vise. The war-function has graspt us so far; but con- 
structive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose 
on the individual a hardly lighter burden. 
Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to 
make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should 
toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, 
and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth 
and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain 
and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vaca- 
tion, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this 
campaigning life at all—this is capable of arousing indignation in re- 
flective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some 
of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly 
ease. If now—and this is my idea—there were, instead of military 
conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form 
for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against 
nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other 
goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of 
hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the 
people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are 
blind, to man’s real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the perma- 
nently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron 
mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, 
clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel- 
making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, 
would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get 
the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with 
healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their 
plood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare 
against nature, they would tread the earth more proudly, the women 
would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teach- 
ers of the following generation. 
Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would 
have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would pre- 
serve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the 
military party 1s so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get 
toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty 
as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is tem- 
porary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of 
one’s life. I spoke of the “ moral equivalent ” of war. So far, war has 
been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until 
