the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to
work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The
need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to
warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born
that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if
they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of
the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do
this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom
remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must
earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should
be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does
not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at
whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of
contempt, an object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave
man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve
his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning
philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are
right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness.
War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity.
But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war.
The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether
the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The
question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question
must be, Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness
once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile
people must be, "Yes," whatever the cost. Every honorable effort
should always be made to avoid war; just as every honorable effort
should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of
a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual,
no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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