eat armies? Manifold, doubtless.
On the economical side there is the diminution of production, the tax
upon men's time and lives, the disadvantages or evils so dinned daily
into our ears that there is no need of repeating them here. But is
there nothing to the credit side of the account, even perhaps a
balance in their favor? Is it nothing, in an age when authority is
weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a nation
passes through a school in which order, obedience, and reverence are
learned, where the body is systematically developed, where ideals of
self-surrender, of courage, of manhood, are inculcated, necessarily,
because fundamental conditions of military success? Is it nothing that
masses of youths out of the fields and the streets are brought
together, mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents,
taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with mind, and
carrying back into civil life that respect for constituted authority
which is urgently needed in these days when lawlessness is erected
into a religion? It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expression and
movements of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first
drills, and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the
faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets. A military
training is not the worst preparation for an active life, any more
than the years spent at college are time lost, as another school of
utilitarians insists. Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace
better secured, by the mutual respect of nations for each other's
strength; and that, when a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly,
leaving the ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore
more easily? War now not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the
character of an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy. A
century or more ago it was a chronic disease. And withal, the military
spirit, the preparedness--not merely the willingness, which is a
different thing--to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good,
is more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than ever it was
when the soldier was merely the paid man. It is the nations now that
are in arms, and not simply the servants of the king.

In forecasting the future, then, it is upon these particular signs of
the times that I dwell: the arrest of the forward impulse towards
political colonization which coincided with the decade imm