arks, pacificist though I am, I will refuse to speak of the
bestial side of the war-_regime_ (already done justice to by many
writers) and consider only the higher aspects of militaristic
sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor does any one
deny that war is the romance of history. But inordinate ambitions are
the soul of every patriotism, and the possibility of violent death the
soul of all romance. The militarily patriotic and romantic-minded
everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to
admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social
evolution. The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they
say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life?
If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view,
to redeem life from flat degeneration.

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it
religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the
vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question
of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature
at its highest dynamic. Its "horrors" are a cheap price to pay for
rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and
teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of "consumer's leagues" and
"associated charities," of industrialism unlimited, and feminism
unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a
cattleyard of a planet!

So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy minded
person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking of it.
Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and human
life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks or
prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
type of military character which every one feels that the race should
never cease to breed, for every one is sensitive to its superiority.
The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military characters in
stock--of keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and
as pure pieces of perfection,--so that Roosevelt's weaklings and
mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the
face of nature.

This natural sort of feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul of
army-writings. Without any exception known to me, militarist authors
take a highly mystical view of their subject, and regar