as upon this plain
fact that William James sought to vindicate the possibility of what he
called, in his famous essay of that title, "a moral equivalent of war."
He affirmed that "the war party is assuredly right in affirming and
reaffirming that the martial virtues are absolute and permanent human
goods." But, he continues, "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"; nor, we may add, its only present
form. "It would be simply preposterous," says James again, "if the only
force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into
English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the
Germans or Japanese. Great indeed is fear, but it is not, as our
military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only
stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual
energy. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests
and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. The only thing needed
henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has
inflamed the military temper." And it is here that James urges, as his
"moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal
and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to
dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and
tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of
sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax--in the immemorial human
warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that
those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing
dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building
sky-scrapers, are already heroes, trained like the soldier to "the
military ideals of hardihood and discipline!"

There is a heroism of peace comparable in every way to the heroism of
war. Nay, we would go further and say that there is a heroism of peace
superior in many ways to the heroism of war. The true soldier, as we
have seen, is necessarily a hero; but the true hero is by no means
necessarily a soldier. On the contrary, there have been thousands of men
who have ascended to heights of heroic endeavor and achievement, to
which the soldier from the very nature of his profession has never been
able to attain. Emerson declares in his great essa