Indeed, do not a great part of the governing classes of Germany almost daily bewail the infiltration of anti-militarist doctrines among the German people, and does not the extraordinary increase in the Socialist vote justify the complaint?
A precisely analogous plea is made by the Nationalist writer in France when he rails at the pacifist tendencies of his country, and points to the contrasting warlike activities of neighbouring nations. A glance at a copy of practically any Nationalist or Conservative paper in France will furnish ample evidence of this. Hardly a day passes but that the Echo de Paris, Gaulois, Figaro, Journal des Débats, Patrie, or Presse, sounds this note, while one may find it rampant in the works of such serious writers as Paul Bourget, Faguet, Le Bon, Barrès, Brunetière, Paul Adam, to say nothing of more popular publicists like Deroulède, Millevoye, Drumont, etc.
All these advocates of war, therefore—American, English, German, French—are at one in declaring that foreign countries are very warlike, but that their own country, “sunk in sloth,” is drifting away from war. As presumably they know more of their own country than of others, their own testimony involves mutual destruction of their own theories. They are thus unwilling witnesses to the truth, which is that we are all alike—English, Americans, Germans, French—losing the psychological impulse to war, just as we have lost the psychological impulse to kill our neighbors on account of religious differences, and (at least in the case of the Anglo-Saxon) to kill our neighbors in duels for some cause of wounded vanity.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activities and its infinitesimal proportion of military ones, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?
Not only evolution, but common sense and common observation, teaches us that we develop most those qualities which we exercise most, which serve us best in the occupation in which we are most engaged. A race of seamen is not developed by agricultural pursuits, carried on hundreds of miles from the sea.
Take the case of what is reputed (quite wrongly, incidentally) to be the most military nation in Europe—Germany. The immense majority of adult Germans—practically, all who make up what we know as Germany—have never seen a battle, and in all human probability never will see one. In forty years eight thousand Germans have been in the field about twelve months—against naked blacks.66 So that the proportion of warlike activities to peaceful activities works out at one to hundreds of thousands. I wish it were possible to illustrate this diagrammatically; but it could not be done in this book, because, if a single dot the size of a full-stop were to be used to illustrate the expenditure of time in actual war, I should have to fill most of the book with dots to illustrate the time spent by the balance of the population in peace activities.67
In that case, how can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities, when all our interests and activities—all our environments, in short—are peace-like?
In other words, the occupations which develop the qualities of industry and peace are so much in excess of those which would develop the qualities we associate with war that that excess has almost now passed beyond any ordinary means of visual illustration, and has entirely passed beyond any ordinary human capacity fully to appreciate. Peace is with us now nearly always; war is with us rarely, yet we are told that it is the qualities of war which will survive, and the qualities of peace which will be subsidiary.
I am not forgetting, of course, the military training, the barrack life which is to keep alive the military tradition. I have dealt with that question in the next chapter. It suffices for the moment to note that that training is defended on the grounds (notably among those who would introduce it into England)—(1) that it ensures peace; (2) that it renders a population more efficient in the arts of peace—that is to say, perpetuates that condition of “slothful ease” which we are told is so dangerous to our characters, in which we are bound to lose the “warlike qualities,” and which renders society still more “gourmandizing” in Mr. Lea’s contemptuous phrase, still more “Cobdenite” in Mr. Leo Maxse’s. One cannot have it both ways. If long-continued peace is enervating, it is mere self-stultification to plead for conscription on the ground that it will still further prolong that enervating condition. If Mr. Leo Maxse sneers at industrial society and the peace ideal—“the Cobdenite ideal of buying cheap and selling dear”—he must not defend German conscription (though he does) on the ground that it renders German commerce more efficient—that, in other words, it advances that “Cobdenite ideal.” In that case, the drift away from war will be stronger than ever. Perhaps some of all this inconsistency was in Mr. Roosevelt’s mind when he declared that by “war alone” can man develop those manly qualities, etc. If conscription really does prolong peace and increase our aptitude for the arts of peace, then conscription itself is but a factor in man’s temperamental drift away from war, in the change of his nature towards peace.
It is not because man is degenerate or swinish or gluttonous (such language, indeed, applied
