le population gets incandescent, and on the ruins of the old morals
of military honor, a stable system of morals of civic honor builds
itself up. What the whole community comes to believe in grasps the
individual as in a vise. The war-function has grasped us so far; but
constructive interests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose
on the individual a hardly lighter burden.

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing to make
one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil
and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and
we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and
opportunity, should have a life of _nothing else_ but toil and pain and
hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation,
while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this
campaigning life at all,--_this_ is capable of arousing indignation in
reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that
some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly
ease. If now--and this is my idea--there were, instead of military
conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form
for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against
_Nature_, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other
goods to the commonwealth would follow. 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
dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and
tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of
skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their
choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back
into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would
have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human
warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the
women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and
teachers of the following generation.

Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have
required it, and the many m