oral fruits it would bear, would preserve in
the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the
military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should
get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal
cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is
temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of
one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has
been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an
equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its
way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames
of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of
organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other
just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a
question of time, of skilful propagandism, and of opinion-making men
seizing historic opportunities.

The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor
and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in
a fashion educated to it and we should all feel some degree of it
imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to
the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our
pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without
humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed
henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has
inflamed the military temper. H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the centre
of the situation. "In many ways," he says, "military organization is
the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from
the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration,
underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he
steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and
cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. Here at least
men are not flung out of employment to degenerate because there is no
immediate work for them to do. They are fed and drilled and trained
for better services. Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion
by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking. And beside the feeble
and irregular endowment of research by commercialism, its little
short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation and scientific economy,
see how remarkable is the steady and ra