The facts want a little closer examination. What is a career of unwarlike ease, in Mr. Roosevelt’s phrase? In the last chapter we saw that during the last forty years eight thousand out of sixty million Germans have been engaged in warfare during a trifle over a year, and that against Hottentots or Hereros—a proportion of war days per German to peace days per German which is as one to some hundreds of thousands. So that if we are to take Germany as the type of the military nation, and if we are to accept Mr. Roosevelt’s dictum that by war alone can we acquire “those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life,” we shall nevertheless be doomed to lose them, for under conditions like those of Germany how many of us can ever see war, or can pretend to fall under its influence? As already pointed out, the men who really give the tone to the German nation, to German life and conduct—that is to say, the majority of adult Germans—have never seen a battle and never will see one. France has done much better. Not only has she seen infinitely more actual fighting, but her population is much more militarized than that of Germany, 50 percent more, in fact, since, in order to maintain from a population of forty millions the same effective military force as Germany does with sixty millions, 1½ percent of the French population is under arms as against 1 percent of the German.70
Still more military in organization and in recent practical experience is Russia, and more military than Russia is Turkey, and more military than Turkey as a whole are the semi-independent sections of Turkey, Arabia, and Albania, and then, perhaps, comes Morocco.
On the Western Hemisphere we can draw a like table as to the “warlike, adventurous, manly, and progressive peoples” as compared with the “peaceful, craven, slothful, and decadent.” The least warlike of all, the nation which has had the least training in war, the least experience of it, which has been the least purified by it, is Canada. After that comes the United States, and after that the best—(excuse me, I mean, of course, the worst—i.e., the least warlike)—of the Spanish American republics like Brazil and Argentina; while the most warlike of all, and consequently the most “manly and progressive,” are the “Sambo” republics, like San Domingo, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Venezuela. They are always fighting. If they cannot manage to get up a fight between one another, the various parties in each republic will fight between themselves. Here we get the real thing. The soldiers do not pass their lives in practising the goose-step, cleaning harness, pipeclaying belts, but in giving and taking hard pounding. Several of these progressive republics have never known a year since they declared their independence from Spain in which they have not had a war. And quite a considerable proportion of the populations spend their lives in fighting. During the first twenty years of Venezuela’s independent existence she fought no less than one hundred and twenty important battles, either with her neighbors or with herself, and she has maintained the average pretty well ever since. Every election is a fight—none of your “mouth-fighting,” none of your craven talking-shops for them. Good, honest, hard, manly knocks, with anything from one to five thousand dead and wounded left on the field. The presidents of these strenuous republics are not poltroons of politicians, but soldiers—men of blood and iron with a vengeance, men after Mr. Roosevelt’s own heart, all following “the good old rule, the simple plan.” These are the people who have taken Carlyle’s advice to “shut up the talking-shops.” They fight it out like men; they talk with Gatling-guns and Mausers. Oh, they are a very fine, manly, military lot! If fighting makes for survival, they should completely oust from the field Canada and the United States, one of which has never had a real battle for the best part of its hundred years of craven, sordid, peaceful life, and the other of which Homer Lea assures us is surely dying, because of its tendency to avoid fighting.
Mr. Lea does not make any secret of the fact (and if he did, some of his rhetoric would display it) that he is out of sympathy with predominant American ideals. He might emigrate to Venezuela, or Colombia, or Nicaragua. He would be able to prove to each military dictator in turn that, in converting the country into a shambles, far from committing a foul crime for which such dictators should be, and are, held in execration by civilized men the world over, they are, on the contrary, but obeying one of God’s commands in tune with all the immutable laws of the universe. I desire to write in all seriousness, but, to one who happens to have seen at first hand something of the conditions which arise from a real military conception of civilization, it is very difficult. How does Mr. Roosevelt, who declares that “by war alone can we acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life”; how does Von Stengel, who declares that “war is a test of a nation’s health, political, physical, and moral”; how do our militarists, who infer that the military state is so much finer than the Cobdenite one of commercial pursuits; how does M. Ernest Renan, who declares that war is the condition of progress, and that under peace we should sink
