nly rebel
against being set to work as wage-earners at a task which involved so
much as a daily pricking of their fingers.

Here we have the reason, embodied in the very organism of the human
being, why military activity is something essentially distinct from
industrial, and why any inference drawn from the one to the other is
valueless. And to this primary fact it is necessary to add another. Not
only is the fighting instinct an exceptional phenomenon in man, but the
circumstances which call it into being are in these days exceptional
also. Socialists frequently, when referring to the soldier's conduct,
refer also to conduct of a closely allied kind, such as that of the
members of fire-brigades and the crews of life-boats, and repeat their
previous question of why, since men like these will, without demanding
any exceptional reward, make such exceptional efforts to save the lives
of others, the monopolists of business ability may not be reasonably
expected to forgo all exceptional claims on their own exceptional
products, and distribute among all the superfluous wealth produced by
them just as freely as the fireman climbs his ladder, or as life-belts
are distributed by the boatmen in their work of rescue. And if human
life were nothing but a chronic conflagration or shipwreck, in which all
alike were fighting for bare existence, all alike being menaced by some
terrible and instant death, this argument of the socialists might
doubtless have some truth in it. The men of exceptional ability, by a
variety of ingenious devices, might seek to save others no less
assiduously than themselves, without expecting anything like exceptional
wealth as a reward; for there would, in a case like this, be no question
of wealth for anybody. But as soon as the stress of such a situation was
relaxed, and the abilities of the ablest, liberated from the task of
contending with death, were left free to devote themselves to the
superfluous decoration of life, the artificial tension of the moral
motives would be relaxed. The swimmer who had plunged into the sea to
save a woman from drowning would not take a second plunge to rescue her
silk petticoat. The socialists, in short, when dealing with military and
other cognate heroisms, ignore both of the causes which alone make such
heroisms possible. They ignore the fact that the internal motive is
essentially isolated and exceptional. They ignore the further fact that
the circumstances which alone