Have we not abundant evidence, indeed, that the passion of patriotism, as divorced from material interest, is being modified by the pressure of material interest? Are not the numberless facts of national interdependence, which I have indicated here, pushing inevitably to that result? And are we not justified in concluding that, just as the progress of rationalism has made it possible for the various religious groups to live together, to exist side by side without physical conflict; just as there has been in that domain no necessary choice between universal domination or unending strife, so in like manner will the progress of political rationalism mark the evolution of the relationship of political groups; that the struggle for domination will cease because it will be realized that physical domination is futile, and that instead of either universal strife or universal domination there will come, without formal treaties or Holy Alliances, the general determination for each to go his way undisturbed in his political allegiance, as he is now undisturbed in his religious allegiance?
Perhaps the very strongest evidence that the whole drift of human tendencies is away from such conflict as is represented by war between States is to be found in the writings of those who declare war to be inevitable. Among the writers quoted in the first chapter of this section, there is not one who, if his arguments are examined carefully, does not show that he realizes, consciously, or subconsciously, that man’s disposition to fight, far from being unchanged, is becoming rapidly enfeebled. Take, for instance, one of the latest works voicing the philosophy that war is inevitable; that, indeed, it is both wicked and childish to try to prevent it.62 Notwithstanding that the inevitability of war is the thesis of his book, Homer Lea entitles the first section “The Decline of Militancy,” and shows clearly, in fact, that the commercial activities of the world lead directly away from war.
Trade, ducats, and mortgages are regarded as far greater assets and sources of power than armies or navies. They produce national effeminacy and effeteness.
Now, as this tendency is common to all nations of Christendom—indeed, of the world—since commercial and industrial development is worldwide, it necessarily means, if it is true of any one nation, that the world as a whole is drifting away from the tendency to warfare.
A large part of Homer Lea’s book is a sort of Carlylean girding at what he terms “protoplasmic gourmandizing and retching” (otherwise the busy American industrial and social life of his countrymen). He declares that, when a country makes wealth, production, and industries its sole aim, it becomes “a glutton among nations, vulgar, swinish, arrogant”; “commercialism, having seized hold of the American people, overshadows it, and tends to destroy not only the aspirations and worldwide career open to the nation, but the Republic itself.” “Patriotism in the true sense” (i.e., the desire to go and kill other people) Homer Lea declares almost dead in the United States. The national ideals, even of the native-born American, are deplorably low:
There exists not only individual prejudice against military ideals, but public antipathy; antagonism of politicians, newspapers, churches, colleges, labor unions, theorists, and organized societies. They combat the military spirit as if it were a public evil and a national crime.
In that case, what, in the name of all that is muddleheaded, becomes of the “unchanging tendency towards warfare”? What is all this curious rhetoric of Homer Lea’s (and I have dealt with him at some length, because his principles if not his language are those which characterize much similar literature in England, France, Germany, and the continent of Europe generally) but an admission that the whole tendency is not, as he would have us believe, towards war, but away from it? Here is an author who tells us that war is to be forever inevitable, and in the same breath that men are rapidly conceiving not only a “slothful indifference” to fighting, but a profound antipathy to the military ideal.
Of course, Homer Lea implies that this tendency is peculiar to the American Republic, and is for that reason dangerous to his country; but, as a matter of fact, Homer Lea’s book might be a free translation of much nationalist literature of either France or Germany.63 I cannot recall a single author of either of the four great countries who, treating of the inevitability of war, does not bewail the falling away of his own country from the military ideal, or, at least, the tendency so to fall away. Thus the English journalist reviewing in the Daily Mail Homer Lea’s book cannot refrain from saying:
Is it necessary to point out that there is a moral in all this for us as well as for the American? Surely almost all that Mr. Lea says applies to Great Britain as forcibly as to the United States. We too have lain dreaming. We have let our ideals tarnish. We have grown gluttonous, also. … Shame and folly are upon us as well as upon our brethren. Let us hasten with all our energy to cleanse ourselves of them, that we can look the future in the face without fear.
Exactly the same note dominates the literature of an English protagonist like Mr. Blatchford, the militarist socialist. He talks of the “fatal apathy” of the British people. “The people,” he says, breaking out in anger at the small disposition they show to kill other people, “are conceited, self-indulgent, decadent, and greedy. They will shout for the Empire, but they will not fight for it.”64 A glance at such publications as Blackwood’s, the National Review, the London Spectator, the London World, will reveal precisely similar outbursts.
Of course, Mr. Blatchford declares that the Germans are very different, and that what Mr. Lea (in talking of his country) calls the “gourmandizing and retching” is not at all true of Germany. As a matter of fact, however, the phrase I have
