own, or another's? Where is the savage "yes" and "no," the
unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the
blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?
Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own Utopia.
I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of
some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the
war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to
definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable
criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole
nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in
intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war
becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant
ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations
must make common cause against them. I see no reason why all this
should not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look
forward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as
between civilized peoples.
All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-militarist
party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be
permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically organized
preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently
successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the
more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we
must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which
answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We
must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which
the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the
enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of
private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon
which states are built--unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions
against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite
attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded
enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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