ed out of them, and to
come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideals."[4]

Even in a society which would permit an industrial conscription both of
rich and poor, a certain latent bellicosity, making for war, would
undoubtedly persist. There seems to be an irreducible minimum of
jingoism, just as whatever your precautions, you cannot quite do away
with rats or noxious germs. No nation is free from this cheapest
intoxicant. You may find it with the expensive American on his travels
or on the cracker-barrels in the country store and you cannot help
stumbling over it in the yellow journals and in many dull and
respectable newspapers which do not know that they are yellow. Even
the self-depreciating type of American may turn out to be a jingo if
you will trouble to take off his peel.

Such jingoism, however, though unpleasant may be quite innocuous. We
all have a trace of it as we all are supposed to have a trace of
tuberculosis. So long as our jingoes confine themselves to merely
trumpeting national virtues, actual and imputed, we may rest content.
Such men will scarcely be capable of stirring a whole population to
war, if men are living under decent conditions, struggling for still
better conditions, and competing on a high plane. If we can secure
prosperity, efficiency and equality and can make life fuller, more
intense, varied and romantic, the ravages of jingoism will be
circumscribed.

It will be argued, however, that though we make our conditions what we
will we shall still be anxious to fight at the first opportunity. "It
is evident," says Prof. Sumner,[5] {197} "that men love war; when two
hundred thousand men in the United States volunteer in a month for a
war with Spain which appeals to no sense of wrong against their country
and to no other strong sentiment of human nature, when their lives are
by no means monotonous or destitute of interest, and where life offers
chances of wealth and prosperity, the pure love of adventure and war
must be strong in our population." If two hundred thousand volunteer
for a war when we are not obviously attacked, will not the whole
country go to war for the sake of "honour"?

It would be foolish to answer this question categorically; no one can
predict what a nation will do when wounded in its self-esteem. The
heir of thousands of centuries of fighting, man is to-day, as always, a
fragile container of dynamite, not guaranteed against explosion, a