The military discipline works miracles. The problem before the captains of armies is to take the body of man, the most naturally egoistic of all things, which hates pain and which will normally take to its legs in danger and try to save itself, and to dominate it so that the body and the soul inhabiting it will stand still and face all it loathes. And the problem is solved in the vast majority of cases. After military training the civilians who formerly would fly before a few policemen will manfully and heroically stand, not the blows of a baton, but a whole hail of bullets, a cannonade lasting through a day; nay, they will for weeks and months, day by day, risk and lose life for a cause, for an idea, at a word of command. They may not have half as good a cause to lose life for as they had as a mob of angry civilians, but they will face death now, and the chances of mutilation and agony worse than death. Can we inspire civilians with the same passionate self-forgetfulness in the pursuit of the higher ideals of peace? Men in a regiment have to a large extent the personal interests abolished. The organization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life. By their union with it a new being is created. Exercise, drill, maneuver, accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that they feel their highest life is the corporate one; and that feeling is fostered continually, until at last all the units, by some law of the soul, are as it were in spite of themselves, in spite of the legs which want to run, in spite of the body which trembles with fear, constrained to move in obedience to the purpose of the whole organism expressed by its controlling will; and so we get these devoted masses of men who advance again and again under a hail more terrible than Dante imagined falling in his vision of the fiery world. There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higher minds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civic ideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, "give their bodies for the commonwealth," but will devote mind, will, and imagination with equal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilization which will be the inheritance of all and a cause of pride to every one, and which will bring to the individual a greater beauty and richness of life than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of which he was capable. I believe that an organization of society, such as I have indicated, would evolve gradually a similar passion for the general zeal, having, without the stern restraint militarism imposes on its units, a like power of turning the thoughts to the general good.