The militarist authorities I have quoted in the preceding chapter admit, therefore, and admit very largely, man’s drift, in a sentimental sense, away from war. But that drift, they declare, is degeneration; without those qualities which “war alone,” in Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase, can develop, man will “rot and decay.”

This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that the qualities which we associate with war, and nothing else but war, are necessary to assure a nation success in its struggles with other nations is equivalent to saying that those who drift away from war will go down before those whose warlike activity can conserve those qualities essential to survival; and this is but another way of saying that men must always remain warlike if they are to survive, that the warlike nations inherit the earth; that men’s pugnacity, therefore, is the outcome of the great natural law of survival, and that a decline of pugnacity marks in any nation a retrogression and not an advance in its struggle for survival. I have already indicated (Chapter II, Part II) the outlines of the proposition, which leaves no escape from this conclusion. This is the scientific basis of the proposition voiced by the authorities I have quoted⁠—Mr. Roosevelt, Von Moltke, Renan, Nietzsche, and various of the warlike clergy68⁠—and it lies at the very bottom of the plea that man’s nature, in so far as it touches the tendency of men as a whole to go to war, does not change; that the warlike qualities are a necessary part of human vitality in the struggle for existence; that, in short, all that we know of the law of evolution forbids the conclusion that man will ever lose this warlike pugnacity, or that nations will survive other than by the struggle of physical force.

The view is best voiced, perhaps, by Homer Lea, whom I have already quoted. He says, in his Valor of Ignorance:

As physical vigor represents the strength of man in his struggle for existence, in the same sense military vigor constitutes the strength of nations; ideals, laws, constitutions are but temporary effulgences [p. 11]. The deterioration of the military force and the consequent destruction of the militant spirit have been concurrent with national decay [p. 24]. International disagreements are⁠ ⁠… the result of the primordial conditions that sooner or later cause war⁠ ⁠… the law of struggle, the law of survival, universal, unalterable⁠ ⁠… to thwart them, to shortcut them, to circumvent them, to cozen, to deny, to scorn, to violate them, is folly such as man’s conceit alone makes possible.⁠ ⁠… Arbitration denies the inexorability of natural laws⁠ ⁠… that govern the existence of political entities [pp. 76, 77]. Laws that govern the militancy of a people are not of man’s framing, but follow the primitive ordinances of nature that govern all forms of life, from simple protozoa, awash in the sea, to the empires of man.69

I have already indicated the grave misconception which lies at the bottom of the interpretation of the evolutionary law here indicated. What we are concerned with now is to deal with the facts on which this alleged general principle is inductively based. We have seen from the foregoing chapter that man’s nature certainly does change; the next step is to show, from the facts of the present-day world, that the warlike qualities do not make for survival, that the warlike nations do not inherit the earth.

Which are the military nations? We generally think of them in Europe as Germany and France, or perhaps also Russia, Austria, and Italy. Admittedly (vide all the English and American military pundits and economists) England is the least militarized nation in Europe, the United States perhaps in the world. It is, above all, Germany that appeals to us as the type of the military nation, one in which the stern school of war makes for the preservation of the “manly and adventurous qualities.”

The facts want a little closer examination. What is a career of unwarlike ease, in Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase? In the last chapter we saw that during the last forty years eight thousand out of sixty million Germans have been engaged in warfare during a trifle over a year, and that against Hottentots or Hereros⁠—a proportion of war days per German to peace days per German which is as one to some hundreds of thousands. So that if we are to take Germany as the type of the military nation, and if we are to accept Mr. Roosevelt’s dictum that by war alone can we acquire “those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life,” we shall nevertheless be doomed to lose them, for under conditions like those of Germany how many of us can ever see war, or can pretend to fall under its influence? As already pointed out, the men who really give the tone to the German nation, to German life and conduct⁠—that is to say, the majority of adult Germans⁠—have never seen a battle and never will see one. France has done much better. Not only has she seen infinitely more actual fighting, but her population is much more militarized than that of Germany, 50 percent more, in fact, since, in order to maintain from a population of forty millions the same effective military force as Germany does with sixty millions, 1½ percent of the French population is under arms as against 1 percent of the German.70

Still more military in organization and in recent practical experience is Russia, and more military than Russia is Turkey, and more military than Turkey as a whole are the semi-independent sections of Turkey, Arabia, and Albania, and then, perhaps, comes Morocco.

On the Western Hemisphere we can draw a like table as to the “warlike, adventurous, manly, and progressive peoples” as compared with the “peaceful, craven, slothful, and decadent.” The least warlike of all, the nation which has had the least training in war, the least experience of it, which has been the least purified by it, is Canada. After that comes the United States, and after that the best⁠—(excuse me, I mean, of course, the worst⁠—i.e., the least warlike)⁠—of the Spanish American republics like Brazil and Argentina; while the most warlike of all, and consequently the most “manly and progressive,” are the “Sambo” republics, like San Domingo, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela. They are always fighting. If they cannot manage to get up a fight between one another, the various parties in each republic will fight between themselves. Here we get the real thing. The soldiers do not pass their lives in practising the goose-step, cleaning harness, pipeclaying belts, but in giving and taking hard pounding. Several of these progressive republics have never known a year since they declared their independence from Spain in which they have not had a war. And quite a considerable proportion of the populations spend their lives in fighting. During the first twenty years of Venezuela’s independent existence she fought no less than one hundred and twenty important battles, either with her neighbors or with herself, and she has maintained the average pretty well ever since. Every election is a fight⁠—none of your “mouth-fighting,” none of your craven talking-shops for them. Good, honest, hard, manly knocks, with anything from one to five thousand dead and wounded left on the field. The presidents of these strenuous republics are not poltroons of politicians, but soldiers⁠—men of blood and iron with a vengeance, men after Mr. Roosevelt’s own heart, all following “the good old rule, the simple plan.” These are the people who have taken Carlyle’s advice to “shut up the talking-shops.” They fight it out like men; they talk with Gatling-guns and Mausers. Oh, they are a very fine, manly, military lot! If fighting makes for survival, they should completely oust from the field Canada and the United States, one of which has never had a real battle for the best part of its hundred years of craven, sordid, peaceful life, and the other of which Homer Lea assures us is surely dying, because of its tendency to avoid fighting.

Mr. Lea does not make any secret of the fact (and if he did, some of his rhetoric would display it) that he is out of sympathy with predominant American ideals. He might emigrate to Venezuela, or Colombia, or Nicaragua. He would be able to prove to each military dictator in turn that, in converting the country into a shambles, far from committing a foul crime for which such dictators should be, and are, held in execration by civilized men the world over, they are, on the contrary, but obeying one of God’s commands in tune with all the immutable laws of the universe. I desire to write in all seriousness, but, to one who happens to have seen at first hand something of the conditions which arise from a real military conception of civilization, it is very difficult. How does Mr. Roosevelt, who declares that “by war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life”; how does Von Stengel, who declares that “war is a test of a nation’s health, political, physical, and moral”; how do our militarists, who infer that the military state is so much finer than the Cobdenite one of commercial pursuits; how does M. Ernest Renan, who declares that war is the condition of progress, and that under peace we should sink to a degree of degeneracy difficult to realize; and how do the various English clergymen who voice a like philosophy reconcile their creed with military Spanish America? How can they urge that nonmilitary industrialism, which, with all its shortcomings, has on the Western Continent given us Canada and the United States, makes for decadence and degeneration, while militarism and the qualities and instincts that go with it have given us Venezuela and San Domingo? Do we not all recognize that industrialism⁠—Mr. Lea’s “gourmandizing and retching” notwithstanding⁠—is the one thing which will save these military republics; that the one condition of their advance is that they shall give up the stupid and sordid gold-braid militarism and turn to honest work?

If ever there was a justification for Herbert Spencer’s sweeping generalization that “advance to the highest forms of man and society depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism,” it is to be found in the history of the South and Central American Republics. Indeed, Spanish America at the present moment affords more lessons than we seem to be drawing, and, if militancy makes for advance and survival, it is a most extraordinary thing that all who are in any way concerned with those countries, all who live in them and whose future is wrapped up in them, can never sufficiently express their thankfulness that at last there seems to be a tendency with some of them to get away from the blood and valor nonsense which has been their curse for three centuries, and to exchange the military ideal for the Cobdenite one of buying cheap and selling dear which excites so much contempt.

Some years ago an Italian lawyer, a certain Tomasso Caivano, wrote a letter detailing his experiences and memories of twenty years’ life in Venezuela and the neighboring republics, and his general conclusions have for this discussion a direct relevancy. As a sort of farewell exhortation to the Venezuelans, he wrote:

The curse of your civilization is the soldier and the soldier’s temper. It is impossible for two of you, still less for two parties, to carry on a discussion without one wanting to fight the other about the matter in hand. You regard it as a derogation of dignity to consider the point of view of the other side, and to attempt to meet it, if it is possible to fight about it. You deem that personal valor atones for all defects. The soldier of evil character is more considered amongst you than the civilian of good character, and military adventure is deemed more honorable than honest labor. You overlook the worst corruption, the worst oppression, in your leaders if only they gild it with military fanfaronade and declamation about bravery and destiny and patriotism. Not until there is a change in this spirit will you cease to be the victims of evil oppression. Not until your general populace⁠—your peasantry and your workers⁠—refuse thus to be led to slaughter in quarrels of which they know and care nothing, but into which they are led because they also prefer fighting to work⁠—not until all this happens will those beautiful lands which are among the most fertile on God’s earth support a happy and prosperous people living in contentment and secure possession of the fruits of their labor.71

Spanish America seems at last in a fair way to throwing off the domination of the soldier and awakening from these nightmares of successive military despotisms tempered by assassination, though, in abandoning, in Signor Caivano’s words, “military adventure for honest labor,” she will necessarily have less to do with those deeds of blood and valor of which her history has been so full. But those in South America who matter are not mourning. Really they are not.72

The situation can be duplicated absolutely on the other side of the hemisphere. Change a few names, and you get Arabia or Morocco. Listen to this from a recent London Times article:73

The fact is that for many years past Turkey has almost invariably been at war in some part or other of Arabia.⁠ ⁠… At the present moment Turkey is actually conducting three separate small campaigns within Arabia or upon its borders, and a fourth series of minor operations in Mesopotamia. The last-named movement is against the Kurdish tribes of the Mosul district.⁠ ⁠… Another, and more important, advance is against the truculent Muntefik Arabs of the Euphrates delta.⁠ ⁠… The fourth, and by far the largest, campaign is the unending warfare in the province of Yemen, north of Aden, where the Turks have been fighting intermittently for more than a decade. The peoples of Arabia are also indulging in conflict on their own account. The interminable feud between the rival potentates of Nedjd, Ibn Saud of Riadh and Ibn Rashid of Hail, has broken out afresh, and the tribes of the coastal province of El Katar are supposed to have plunged into the fray. The Muntefik Arabs, not content with worrying the Turks, are harrying the territories of Sheikh Murbarak of Koweit. In the far south the Sultan of Shehr and Mokalla, a feudatory of the British Government, is conducting a tiny war against a hostile tribe in the mysterious Hadramaut. In the west the Beduin are spasmodically menacing certain sections of the Hedjaz Railway, which they very much dislike.⁠ ⁠… Ten years ago the Ibn Rashids were nominally masters of a great deal of Arabia, and grew so aggressive that they tried to seize Koweit. The fiery old Sheikh of Koweit marched against them, and alternately won and lost. He had his revenge. He sent an audacious scion of the Ibn Sauds to the old Wahabi capital of Riadh, and by a remarkable stratagem the youth captured the stronghold with only fifty men. The rival parties have been fighting at intervals ever since.

And so on and so on to the extent of a column. So that what Venezuela and Nicaragua are to the American Continent, Arabia, Albania, Armenia, Montenegro, and Morocco are to the Eastern Hemisphere. We find exactly the same rule⁠—that just as one gets away from militancy one gets towards advance and civilization; as men lose the tendency to fight they gain the tendency to work, and it is by working with one another, and not by fighting against each other, that men advance.

Take the progression away from militancy, and it gives us a table something like this:

• Arabia and Morocco.

• Turkish territory as a whole.

• The more unruly Balkan States. Montenegro.

• Russia.

• Spain. Italy. Austria.

• France.

• Germany.

• Scandinavia. Holland. Belgium.

• England.

• The United States.

• Canada.

Do Mr. Roosevelt, Admiral Mahan, Baron von Stengel, Marshal von Moltke, Mr. Homer Lea, and the English clergymen seriously argue that this list should be reversed, and that Arabia and Turkey should be taken as the types of progressive nations, and England and Germany and Scandinavia as the decadent?

It may be urged that my list is not absolutely accurate, in that England, having fought more little wars (though the conflict with the Boers, waged with a small, pastoral people, shows how a little war may drain a great country), is more militarized than Germany, which has not been fighting at all. But I have tried in a very rough fashion to arrive at the degree of militancy in each State, and the absence of actual fighting in the case of Germany (as in that of the smaller States) is balanced by the fact of the military training of her people. As I have indicated, France is more military than Germany, both in the extent to which her people are put through the mill of universal military training, and by virtue of the fact that she has done so much more small fighting than Germany (Madagascar, Tonkin, Africa, etc.); while, of course, Turkey and the Balkan States are still more military in both senses⁠—more actual fighting, more military training.

Perhaps the militarist will argue that, while useless and unjust wars make for degeneration, just wars are a moral regeneration. But did a nation, group, tribe, family, or individual ever yet enter into a war which he did not think just? The British, or most of them, believed the war against the Boers just, but most of the authorities in favor of war in general, outside of Great Britain, believed it unjust. Nowhere do you find such deathless, absolute, unwavering belief in the justice of war as in those conflicts which all Christendom knows to be at once unjust and unnecessary. I refer to the religious wars of Mohammedan fanaticism.

Do you suppose that when Nicaragua goes to war with San Salvador, or Costa Rica or Colombia with Peru, or Peru with Chile, or Chile with Argentina, they do not each and every one of them believe that they are fighting for immutable and deathless principles? The civilization of most of them is, of course, as like as two peas, and there is no more reason, except their dislike of rational thought and hard work, why they should fight with one another, than that Illinois should fight with Indiana, despite Homer Lea’s fine words as to the primordial character of national differences; to one another they are as alike, and whether San Salvador beats Costa Rica or Costa Rica, San Salvador, does not, so far as essentials are concerned, matter a continental. But their rhetoric of patriotism⁠—the sacrifice, and the deathless glory, and the rest of it⁠—is often just as sincere as ours. That is the tragedy of it, and it is that which gives to the solution of the problem in Spanish America its real difficulty.

But even if we admit that warfare à l’espagnole may be degrading, and that just wars are ennobling and necessary to our moral welfare, we should nevertheless be condemned to degeneracy and decline. A just war implies that someone must act unjustly towards us, but as the general condition improves⁠—as it is improving in Europe as compared with Central and South America, or Morocco, or Arabia⁠—we shall get less and less “moral purification”; as men become less and less disposed to make unjustifiable attacks, they will become more and more degenerate. In such incoherence are we landed by the pessimistic and impossible philosophy that men will decay and die unless they go on killing each other.

What is the fundamental error at the base of the theory that war makes for the survival of the fit⁠—that warfare is any necessary expression of the law of survival? It is the illusion induced by the hypnotism of a terminology which is obsolete. The same factor which leads us so astray in the economic domain leads us astray in this also.

Conquest does not make for the elimination of the conquered; the weakest do not go to the wall, though that is the process which those who adopt the formula of evolution in this matter have in their minds.

Great Britain has conquered India. Does that mean that the inferior race is replaced by the superior? Not the least in the world; the inferior race not only survives, but is given an extra lease of life by virtue of the conquest. If ever the Asiatic threatens the white race, it will be thanks in no small part to the work of race conservation which England’s conquests in the East have involved. War, therefore, does not make for the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the fit. It would be truer to say that it makes for the survival of the unfit.

What is the real process of war? You carefully select from the general population on both sides the healthiest, sturdiest, the physically and mentally soundest, those possessing precisely the virile and manly qualities which you desire to preserve, and, having thus selected the elite of the two populations, you exterminate them by battle and disease, and leave the worst of both sides to amalgamate in the process of conquest or defeat⁠—because, in so far as the final amalgamation is concerned, both processes have the same result⁠—and from this amalgam of the worst of both sides you create the new nation or the new society which is to carry on the race. Even supposing the better nation wins, the fact of conquest results only in the absorption of the inferior qualities of the beaten nation⁠—inferior presumably because beaten, and inferior because we have killed off their selected best and absorbed the rest, since we no longer exterminate the women, the children, the old men, and those too weak or too feeble to go into the army.74

You have only to carry on this process long enough and persistently enough to weed out completely from both sides the type of man to whom alone we can look for the conservation of virility, physical vigor, and hardihood. That such a process did play no small role in the degeneration of Rome and the populations on which the crux of the Empire reposed there can hardly be any reasonable doubt. And the process of degeneration on the part of the conqueror is aided by this additional factor: If the conqueror profits much by his conquest, as the Romans in one sense did, it is the conqueror who is threatened by the enervating effect of the soft and luxurious life; while it is the conquered who is forced to labor for the conqueror, and learns in consequence those qualities of steady industry which are certainly a better moral training than living upon the fruits of others, upon labor extorted at the sword’s point. It is the conqueror who becomes effete, and it is the conquered who learns discipline and the qualities making for a well-ordered State.

To say of war, therefore, as does Baron von Stengel, that it destroys the frail trees, leaving the sturdy oaks standing, is merely to state with absolute confidence the exact reverse of the truth; to take advantage of loose catchphrases, which by inattention not only distort common thought in these matters, but often turn the truth upside down. Our everyday ideas are full of illustrations of the same thing. For hundreds of years we talked of the “riper wisdom of the ancients,” implying that this generation is the youth in experience, and that the early ages had the accumulated experience⁠—the exact reverse, of course, of the truth. Yet “the learning of the ancients” and “the wisdom of our forefathers” was a common catchphrase, even in the British Parliament, until an English country parson killed this nonsense by ridicule.75

I do not urge that the somewhat simple, elementary, selective process which I have described accounts in itself for the decadence of military Powers. That is only a part of the process; the whole of it is somewhat more complicated, in that the process of elimination of the good in favor of the bad is quite as much sociological as biological; that is to say, if during long periods a nation gives itself up to war, trade languishes, the population loses the habit of steady industry, government and administration become corrupt, abuses escape punishment, and the real sources of a people’s strength and expansion dwindle. What has caused the relative failure and decline of Spanish, Portuguese, and French expansion in Asia and the New World, and the relative success of English expansion therein? Was it the mere hazards of war which gave to Great Britain the domination of India and half of the New World? That is surely a superficial reading of history. It was, rather, that the methods and processes of Spain, Portugal, and France were military, while those of the Anglo-Saxon world were commercial and peaceful. Is it not a commonplace that in India, quite as much as in the New World, the trader and the settler drove out the soldier and the conqueror? The difference between the two methods was that one was a process of conquest, and the other of colonizing, or nonmilitary administration for commercial purposes. The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea, which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other cooperation.76

Those who confound the power of a nation with the size of its army and navy are mistaking the checkbook for the money. A child, seeing its father paying bills in checks, assumes that you need only plenty of checkbooks in order to have plenty of money; it does not see that for the checkbook to have power there must be unseen resources on which to draw. Of what use is domination unless there be individual capacity, social training, industrial resources, to profit thereby? How can you have these things if energy is wasted in military adventure? Is not the failure of Spain explicable by the fact that she failed to realize this truth? For three centuries she attempted to live upon conquest, upon the force of her arms, and year after year got poorer in the process and her modern social renaissance dates from the time when she lost the last of her American colonies. It is since the loss of Cuba and the Philippines that Spanish national securities have doubled in value. (At the outbreak of the Hispano-American War Spanish Fours were at 45; they have since touched par.) If Spain has shown in the last decade a social renaissance, not shown perhaps for a hundred and fifty years, it is because a nation still less military than Germany, and still more purely industrial, has compelled Spain once and for all to surrender all dreams of empire and conquest. The circumstances of the last surrender are eloquent in this connection as showing how even in warfare itself the industrial training and the industrial tradition⁠—the Cobdenite ideal of militarist scorn⁠—are more than a match for the training of a society in which military activities are predominant. If it be true that it was the German schoolmaster who conquered at Sedan, it was the Chicago merchant who conquered at Manila. The writer happens to have been in touch both with Spaniards and Americans at the time of the war, and well remembers the scorn with which the Spaniards referred to the notion that the Yankee pork-butchers could possibly conquer a nation of their military tradition, and to the idea that tradesmen would ever be a match for the soldiery and pride of old Spain. And French opinion was not so very different.77 Shortly after the war I wrote in an American journal as follows:

Spain represents the outcome of some centuries devoted mainly to military activity. No one can say that she has been unmilitary or at all deficient in those qualities which we associate with soldiers and soldiering. Yet, if such qualities in any way make for national efficiency, for the conservation of national force, the history of Spain is absolutely inexplicable. In their late contest with America, Spaniards showed no lack of the distinctive military virtues. Spain’s inferiority⁠—apart from deficiency of men and money⁠—was precisely in those qualities which industrialism has bred in the unmilitary American. Authentic stories of wretched equipment, inadequate supplies, and bad leadership show to what depths of inefficiency the Spanish service, military and naval, had fallen. We are justified in believing that a much smaller nation than Spain, but one possessing a more industrial and less military training, would have done much better, both as regards resistance to America and the defence of her own colonies. The present position of Holland in Asia seems to prove this. The Dutch, whose traditions are industrial and nonmilitary for the most part, have shown greater power and efficiency as a nation than the Spanish, who are more numerous.

Here, as always, it is shown that, in considering national efficiency, even as expressed in military power, the economic problem cannot be divorced from the military, and that it is a fatal mistake to suppose that the power of a nation depends solely upon the power of its public bodies, or that it can be judged simply from the size of its army. A large army may, indeed, be a sign of a national⁠—that is, military⁠—weakness. Warfare in these days is a business like other activities, and no courage, no heroism, no “glorious past,” no “immortal traditions,” will atone for deficient rations and fraudulent administration. Good civilian qualities are the ones that will in the end win a nation’s battles. The Spaniard is the last one in the world to see this. He talks and dreams of Castilian bravery and Spanish honor, and is above shopkeeping details.⁠ ⁠… A writer on contemporary Spain remarks that any intelligent middle-class Spaniard will admit every charge of incompetence which can be brought against the conduct of public affairs. “Yes, we have a wretched Government. In any other country somebody would be shot.” This is the hopeless military creed: killing somebody is the only remedy.

Here we see a trace of that intellectual legacy which Spain has left to the New World, and which has stamped itself so indelibly on the history of Spanish America. On a later occasion in this connection I wrote as follows:

To appreciate the outcome of much soldiering, the condition in which persistent military training may leave a race, one should study Spanish America. Here we have a collection of some score of States, all very much alike in social and political makeup. Most of the South American States so resemble one another in language, laws, institutions, that to an outsider it would seem not to matter a straw under which particular six-months-old republic one should live; whether one be under the Government of the pronunciamento-created President of Colombia, or under that of the President of Venezuela, one’s condition would appear to be much the same. Apparently no particular country has anything which differentiates it from another, and, consequently, anything to protect against the other. Actually, the Governments might all change places and the people be none the wiser. Yet, so hypnotized, are these little States by the “necessity for self-protection,” by the glamour of armaments, that there is not one without a relatively elaborate and expensive military establishment to protect it from the rest.

No conditions seem so propitious for a practical confederation as those of Spanish America; with a few exceptions, the virtual unity of language, laws, general race-ideals, would seem to render protection of frontiers supererogatory. Yet the citizens give untold wealth, service, life, and suffering to be protected against a Government exactly like their own. All this waste of life and energy has gone on without it ever occurring to one of these States that it would be preferable to be annexed a thousand times over, so trifling would be the resulting change in their condition, than continue the everlasting and futile tribute of blood and treasure. Over some absolutely unimportant matter⁠—like that of the Patagonian roads, which nearly brought Argentina and Chile to grips the other day⁠—as much patriotic devotion will be expended as ever the Old Guard lavished in protecting the honor of the Tricolor. Battles will be fought which will make all the struggles in South Africa appear mean in comparison. Actions in which the dead are counted in thousands will excite no more comment in the world than that produced by a skirmish in Natal, in which a score of yeomen are captured and released.78

In the decade since the foregoing was written things have enormously improved in South America. Why? For the simple reason, as pointed out in Chapter V of the first part of this book, that Spanish America is being brought more and more into the economic movement of the world; and with the establishment of factories, in which large capital has been sunk, banks, businesses, etc., the whole attitude of mind of those interested in these ventures is changed. The Jingo, the military adventurer, the fomentor of trouble, are seen for what they are⁠—not as patriots, but as representing exceedingly mischievous and maleficent forces.

This general truth has two facets: if long warfare diverts a people from the capacity for industry, so in the long run economic pressure⁠—the influences, that is, which turn the energies of people to preoccupation with social well-being⁠—is fatal to the military tradition. Neither tendency is constant; warfare produces poverty; poverty pushes to thrift and work, which result in wealth; wealth creates leisure and pride and pushes to warfare.

Where Nature does not respond readily to industrial effort, where it is, at least apparently, more profitable to plunder than to work, the military tradition survives. The Beduin has been a bandit since the time of Abraham, for the simple reason that the desert does not support industrial life nor respond to industrial effort. The only career offering a fair apparent return for effort is plunder. In Morocco, in Arabia, in all very poor pastoral countries, the same phenomenon is exhibited; in mountainous countries which are arid and are removed from the economic centres, idem. The same may have been to some extent the case in Prussia before the era of coal and iron; but the fact that today 99 percent of the population is normally engaged in trade and industry, and 1 percent only in military preparation, and some fraction too small to be properly estimated engaged in actual war, shows how far she has outgrown such a state⁠—shows, incidentally, what little chance the ideal and tradition represented by 1 percent or some fractional percentage has against interests and activities represented by 99 percent. The recent history of South and Central America, because it is recent, and because the factors are less complicated, illustrates best the tendency with which we are dealing. Spanish America inherited the military tradition in all its vigor. As I have already pointed out, the Spanish occupation of the American Continent was a process of conquest rather than of colonizing; and while the mother country got poorer and poorer by the process of conquest, the new countries also impoverished themselves in adherence to the same fatal illusion. The glamour of conquest was, of course, Spain’s ruin. So long as it was possible for her to live on extorted bullion, neither social nor industrial development seemed possible. Despite the common idea to the contrary, Germany has known how to keep this fatal hypnotism at bay, and, far from allowing her military activities to absorb her industrial, it is precisely the military activities which are in a fair way now to being absorbed by the industrial and commercial, and her world commerce has its foundation, not in tribute or bullion exacted at the sword’s point, but in sound and honest exchange. So that today the legitimate commercial tribute which Germany, who never sent a soldier there, exacts from Spanish America is immensely greater than that which goes to Spain, who poured out blood and treasure during three centuries on these territories. In this way, again, do the warlike nations inherit the earth!

If Germany is never to duplicate Spain’s decadence, it is precisely because (1) she has never had, historically, Spain’s temptation to live by conquest, and (2) because, having to live by honest industry, her commercial hold, even upon the territories conquered by Spain, is more firmly set than that of Spain herself.

How may we sum up the whole case, keeping in mind every empire that ever existed⁠—the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Mede and Persian, the Macedonian, the Roman, the Frank, the Saxon, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Bourbon, the Napoleonic? In all and every one of them we may see the same process, which is this: If it remains military it decays; if it prospers and takes its share of the work of the world it ceases to be military. There is no other reading of history.

That history furnishes no justification for the plea that pugnacity and antagonism between nations is bound up in any way with the real process of national survival, shows clearly enough that nations nurtured normally in peace are more than a match for nations nurtured normally in war; that communities of nonmilitary tradition and instincts, like the Anglo-Saxon communities of the New World, show elements of survival stronger than those possessed by communities animated by the military tradition, like the Spanish and Portuguese nations of the New World; that the position of the industrial nations in Europe as compared with the military gives no justification for the plea that the warlike qualities make for survival. It is clearly evident that there is no biological justification in the terms of man’s political evolution for the perpetuation of antagonism between nations, nor any justification for the plea that the diminution of such antagonism runs counter to the teachings of the “natural law.” There is no such natural law; in accordance with natural laws, men are being thrust irresistibly towards cooperation between communities and not towards conflict.

There remains the argument that, though the conflict itself may make for degeneration, the preparation for that conflict makes for survival, for the improvement of human nature. I have already touched upon the hopeless confusion which comes of the plea that, while long-continued peace is bad, military preparations find justification in that they insure peace.

Almost every defence of militarism includes a sneer at the ideal of peace because it involves the Cobdenite state of buying cheap and selling dear. But, with equal regularity, the advocate of the military system goes on to argue for great armaments, not as a means of promoting war, that valuable school, etc., but as the best means of securing peace; in other words, that condition of “buying cheap and selling dear” which but a moment before he has condemned as so defective. As though to make the stultification complete, he pleads for the peace value of military training, on the ground that German commerce has benefited from it⁠—that, in other words, it has promoted the “Cobdenite ideal.” The analysis of the reasoning, as has been brilliantly shown by Mr. John M. Robertson,79 gives a result something like this: (1) War is a great school of morals, therefore we must have great armaments to insure peace; (2) to secure peace engenders the Cobdenite ideal, which is bad, therefore we should adopt conscription, (a) because it is the best safeguard of peace, (b) because it is a training for commerce⁠—the Cobdenite ideal.

Is it true that barrack training⁠—the sort of school which the competition of armaments during the last generation has imposed on the people of Continental Europe⁠—makes for moral health? Is it likely that a “perpetual rehearsal for something never likely to come off, and when it comes off is not like the rehearsal,” should be a training for life’s realities? Is it likely that such a process would have the stamp and touch of closeness to real things? Is it likely that the mechanical routine of artificial occupations, artificial crimes, artificial virtues, artificial punishments should form any training for the battle of real life?80 What of the Dreyfus case? What of the abominable scandals that have marked German military life of late years? If peace military training is such a fine school, how could the London Times write thus of France after she had submitted to a generation of a very severe form of it:

A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilized world outside France when the result of the Rennes Court-Martial became known.⁠ ⁠… By their (the officers’) own admission, whether flung defiantly at the judges, their inferiors, or wrung from them under cross-examination, Dreyfus’s chief accusers were convicted of gross and fraudulent illegalities which, anywhere, would have sufficed, not only to discredit their testimony⁠—had they any serious testimony to offer⁠—but to transfer them speedily from the witness-box to the prisoner’s dock.⁠ ⁠… Their vaunted honor “rooted in dishonor stood.”⁠ ⁠… Five judges out of the seven have once more demonstrated the truth of the astounding axiom first propounded during the Zola trial, that “military justice is not as other justice.”⁠ ⁠… We have no hesitation in saying that the Rennes Court-Martial constitutes in itself the grossest, and, viewed in the light of the surrounding circumstances, the most appalling prostitution of justice which the world has witnessed in modern times.⁠ ⁠… Flagrantly, deliberately, mercilessly trampled justice underfoot.⁠ ⁠… The verdict, which is a slap in the face to the public opinion of the civilized world, to the conscience of humanity.⁠ ⁠… France is henceforth on her trial before history. Arraigned at the bar of a tribunal far higher than that before which Dreyfus stood, it rests with her to show whether she will undo this great wrong and rehabilitate her fair name, or whether she will stand irrevocably condemned and disgraced by allowing it to be consummated. We can less than ever afford to underrate the forces against truth and justice.⁠ ⁠… Hypnotized by the wild tales perpetually dinned into all credulous ears of an international “syndicate of treason,” conspiring against the honor of the army and the safety of France, the conscience of the French nation has been numbed, and its intelligence atrophied.⁠ ⁠… Amongst those statesmen who are in touch with the outside world in the Senate and Chamber there must be some that will remind her that nations, no more than individuals, cannot bear the burden of universal scorn and live.⁠ ⁠… France cannot close her ears to the voice of the civilized world, for that voice is the voice of history.81

And what the Times said then all England was saying, and not only all England, but all America.

And has Germany escaped a like condemnation? We commonly assume that the Dreyfus case could not be duplicated in Germany. But this is not the opinion of very many Germans themselves. Indeed, just before the Dreyfus case reached its crisis, the Kotze scandal⁠—in its way just as grave as the Dreyfus affair, and revealing a moral condition just as serious⁠—prompted the London Times to declare that “certain features of German civilization are such as to make it difficult for Englishmen to understand how the whole State does not collapse from sheer rottenness.” If that could be said of the Kotze affair, what shall be said of the state of things which has been revealed by Maximilien Harden among others?

Need it be said that the writer of these lines does not desire to represent Germans as a whole as more corrupt than their neighbors? But impartial observers are not of opinion, and very many Germans are not of opinion, that there has been either economic, social, or moral advantage to the German people from the victories of 1870 and the state of regimentation which the sequel has imposed. This is surely evidenced by the actual position of affairs in the German Empire, the complex difficulty with which the German people are now struggling, the growing discontent, the growing influence of those elements which are nurtured in discontent, the growth on one side of radical intransigence and on the other of almost feudal autocracy, the failure to effect normally and easily those democratic developments which have been effected in almost every other European State, the danger for the future which such a situation represents, the precariousness of German finance, the relatively small profit which her population as a whole has received from the greatly increased foreign trade⁠—all this, and much more, confirms that view. England has of late seemed to have been affected with the German superstition. With the curious perversity that marks “patriotic” judgments, the whole tendency of the English has been to make comparisons with Germany to the disadvantage of themselves and of other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed, much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely nonexistent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.82

Despite the hypnotism which German “progress” seems to exercise on the minds of English Jingoes, the German people themselves, as distinct from the small group of Prussian Junkers, are not in the least enamored of it, as is proved by the unparalleled growth of the social-democratic element, which is the negation of military imperialism, and which, as the figures in Prussia prove, receives support not from one class of the population merely, but from the mercantile, industrial, and professional classes as well. The agitation for electoral reform in Prussia shows how acute the conflict has become; on the one side the increasing democratic element showing more and more of a revolutionary tendency, and on the other side the Prussian autocracy showing less and less disposition to yield. Does anyone really believe that the situation will remain there, that the Democratic parties will continue to grow in numbers and be content forever to be ridden down by the “booted Prussian,” and that German democracy will indefinitely accept a situation in which it will be always possible⁠—in the words of the Junker, von Oldenburg, member of the Reichstag⁠—for the German Emperor to say to a Lieutenant, “Take ten men and close the Reichstag”?

What must be the German’s appreciation of the value of military victory and militarization when, mainly because of it, he finds himself engaged in a struggle which elsewhere less militarized nations settled a generation since? And what has the English defender of the militarist regimen, who holds the German system up for imitation, to say of it as a school of national discipline, when the Imperial Chancellor himself defends the refusal of democratic suffrage like that obtaining in England on the ground that the Prussian people have not yet acquired those qualities of public discipline which make it workable in England?83

Yet what Prussia, in the opinion of the Chancellor, is not yet fit for, Scandinavian nations, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, have fitted themselves for without the aid of military victory and subsequent regimentation. Did not someone once say that the war had made Germany great and Germans small?

When we ascribe so large a measure of Germany’s social progress (which no one, so far as I know, is concerned to deny) to the victories and regimentation, why do we conveniently overlook the social progress of the small States which I have just mentioned, where such progress on the material side has certainly been as great as, and on the moral side greater than, in Germany? Why do we overlook the fact that, if Germany has done well in certain social organizations, Scandinavia and Switzerland have done better? And why do we overlook the fact that, if regimentation is of such social value, it has been so completely inoperative in States which are more highly militarized even than Germany⁠—in Spain, Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Russia?

But even assuming⁠—a very large assumption⁠—that regimentation has played the role in German progress which English Germano-maniacs would have us believe, is there any justification for supposing that a like process would be in any way adaptable to English conditions social, moral, material, and historical?

The position of Germany since the war of 1870⁠—what it has stood for in the generation since victory, and what it stood for in the generations that followed defeat⁠—furnishes a much-needed lesson as to the outcome of the philosophy of force. Practically all impartial observers of Germany are in agreement with Mr. Harbutt Dawson when he writes as follows:

It is questionable whether unified Germany counts as much today as an intellectual and moral agent in the world as when it was little better than a geographical expression.⁠ ⁠… Germany has at command an apparently inexhaustible reserve of physical and material force, but the real influence and power which it exerts is disproportionately small. The history of civilization is full of proofs that the two things are not synonymous. A nation’s mere force is, on ultimate analysis, its sum of brute strength. This force may, indeed, go with intrinsic power, yet such power can never depend permanently on force, and the test is easy to apply.⁠ ⁠… No one who genuinely admires the best in the German character, and who wishes well to the German people, will seek to minimize the extent of the loss which would appear to have befallen the old national ideals; hence the discontent of the enlightened classes with the political laws under which they live⁠—a discontent often vague and indefinite, the discontent of men who do not know clearly what is wrong or what they want, but feel that a free play is denied them which belongs to the dignity and worth and essence of human personality.

“Is there a German culture today?” asks Fuchs.84 “We Germans are able to perfect all works of civilizing power as well as, and indeed better than, the best in other nations. Yet nothing that the heroes of labor execute goes beyond our own border.” And the most extraordinary thing is that those who do not in the least deny this condition to which Germany has fallen⁠—who, indeed, exaggerate it, and ask us with triumph to look upon the brutality of German method and German conception⁠—ask us to go and follow Germany’s example!

Most British pro-armament agitation is based upon the plea that Germany is dominated by a philosophy of force. They point to books like those of General Bernhardi, idealizing the employment of force, and then urge a policy of replying by force⁠—and force only⁠—which would, of course, justify in Germany the Bernhardi school, and by the reaction of opposing forces stereotype the philosophy in Europe and make it part of the general European tradition. England stands in danger of becoming Prussianized by virtue of the fact of fighting Prussianism, or rather by virtue of the fact that, instead of fighting it with the intellectual tools that won religious freedom in Europe, she insists upon confining her efforts to the tools of physical force.

Some of the acutest foreign students of English progress⁠—men like Edmond Demolins⁠—ascribe it to the very range of qualities which the German system is bound to crush; their aptitude for initiative, their reliance upon their own efforts, their sturdy resistance to State interference (already weakening), their impatience with bureaucracy and red tape (also weakening), all of which is wrapped up with general rebelliousness to regimentation.

Though the English base part of the defence of armaments on the plea that, economic interest apart, they desire to live their own life in their own way, to develop in their own fashion, do they not run some danger that with this mania for the imitation of German method they may Germanize England, though never a German soldier land on their soil?

Of course, it is always assumed that, though the English may adopt the French and German system of conscription, they could never fall a victim to the defects of those systems, and that the scandals which break out from time to time in France and Germany could never be duplicated by their barrack system, and that the military atmosphere of their own barracks, the training in their own army, would always be wholesome. But what do even its defenders say?

Mr. Blatchford himself says:85

Barrack life is bad. Barrack life will always be bad. It is never good for a lot of men to live together apart from home influences and feminine. It is not good for women to live or work in communities of women. The sexes react upon each other; each provides for the other a natural restraint, a wholesome incentive.⁠ ⁠… The barracks and the garrison town are not good for young men. The young soldier, fenced and hemmed in by a discipline unnecessarily severe, and often stupid, has at the same time an amount of license which is dangerous to all but those of strong good sense and strong will. I have seen clean, good, nice boys come into the Army and go to the devil in less than a year. I am no Puritan. I am a man of the world; but any sensible and honest man who has been in the Army will know at once that what I am saying is entirely true, and is the truth expressed with much restraint and moderation. A few hours in a barrack-room would teach a civilian more than all the soldier stories ever written. When I joined the Army I was unusually unsophisticated for a boy of twenty. I had been brought up by a mother. I had attended Sunday-school and chapel. I had lived a quiet, sheltered life, and I had an astonishing amount to learn. The language of the barrack-room shocked me, appalled me. I could not understand half I heard; I could not credit much that I saw. When I began to realize the truth, I took my courage in both hands and went about the world I had come into with open eyes. So I learnt the facts, but I must not tell them.86