re favourable economic situation, would
still be unsatisfied. Conflict would endure. It is well that it
should be so, for a society in which all were contented in a
buttressed, routine life would go to war through sheer boredom.

The economic antidote to imperialism thus resolves itself into a very
necessary intellectual and emotional antidote. The lure of war
persists even to-day, when soldiers dig themselves into burrows and
individual courage is lost in the vast magnitude of the contest. Nor
can you {195} counteract the temptation to fight (or have others fight)
by preaching sermons against war, for the sermon and the bugle-call
seem to appeal to different cells in the brain. All you can do is to
polarise a man's thoughts and inspire him with other interests,
ambitions and ideals. A full, varied, intense life is a better
antidote than a mere vacuity of existence, without toil, pleasure, pain
or excitement. In his search for an antidote to war, William James
points out how utterly the ordinary pacifist ignores the stubborn
instincts that impel men to battle. "We inherit," he says, "the
war-like type.... Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and
marrow, and thousands of years won't breed it out of us. The popular
imagination fairly fattens on the thoughts of war." The men at the
bottom of society, James assures us, "are as tough as nails and
physically and morally almost as insensitive," and if not to these then
to all "who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavours ... the
whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and
dishwatery." For the discipline of war, William James wishes to
substitute another and more strenuous discipline, "a conscription of
the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a
part of the army enlisted against _Nature_." "The military ideals of
hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the
people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are
blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the
permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. 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 stokeholes, and to the frames of
sky-scrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to
their choice, to get the {196} childishness knock