THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 409 
an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its 
way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames 
of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of 
organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other 
just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question 
of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion-making men seizing 
historic opportunities. 
The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous 
honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical 
men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree 
of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory 
service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, 
and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without 
humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed hence- 
forward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the 
military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the center of the situation. 
“In many ways,” he says, “ military organization is the most peaceful 
of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of 
clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and 
intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher 
social plane, into an atmosphere of service and cooperation and of infi- 
nitely more honorable emulations. Here at least men are not flung 
out of employment to degenerate because there is no immediate work 
for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained for better services. 
Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness, 
and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endow- 
ment of research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at 
profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the 
steady and rapid development of method and appliances in naval and 
military affairs! Nothing is more striking than to compare the prog- 
ress of civil conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the 
trader, to the progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. 
The house-appliances of to-day, for example, are little better than they 
were fifty years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, 
badly heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the 
house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satis- 
factory places of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the 
rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior 
to those we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one 
has a use now for such superannuated things.” 8 
Wells adds* that he thinks that the conceptions of order and dis- 
cipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, un- 
*“First and Last Things,” 1908, p. 215. 
* 1bid., p. 226. 
VOL, LXXVII.—28, 
