The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a very slow process. All man’s history reveals this. The theologian has always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the fact of evil—none the less a fact because unembodied—without having to translate it into a nonexistent person or animal with a forked tail.
As our advance in the understanding of morality is marked by our dropping these crude physical conceptions, is it not likely that our advance in the understanding of those social problems, which so nearly affect our general well-being, will be marked in like manner?
Is it not somewhat childish and elementary to conceive of force only as the firing off of guns and the launching of Dreadnoughts, of struggle as the physical struggle between men, instead of the application of man’s energies to his contest with the planet? Is not the time coming when the real struggle will inspire us with the same respect and even the same thrill as that now inspired by a charge in battle; especially as the charges in battle are getting very out of date, and are shortly to disappear from our warfare? The mind which can only conceive of struggle as bombardment and charges is, of course, the Dervish mind. Not that Fuzzy-Wuzzy is not a fine fellow. He is manly, sturdy, hardy, with a courage, and warlike qualities generally, which no European can equal. But the frail and spectacled English official is his master, and a few score of such will make themselves the masters of teeming thousands of Sudanese; the relatively unwarlike Englishman is doing the same thing all over Asia, and he is doing it simply by virtue of superior brain and character, more thought, more rationalism, more steady and controlled hard work. The American is doing the same in the Philippines. It may be said that it is superior armament which does it. But what is the superior armament but the result of superior thought and work? And even without the superior armament the larger intelligence would still do it; for what the Englishman and American do, the Roman did of old, with the same arms as the inhabitants of his vassal worlds. Force is indeed the master, but it is the force of intelligence, character, and rationalism.
I can imagine the contempt with which the man of physical force greets the foregoing. To fight with words, to fight with talk! No, not words, but ideas. And something more than ideas. Their translation into practical effort, into organization, into the direction and administration of organization, into the strategy and tactics of human life.
What, indeed, is modern warfare in its highest phases but this? Is it not altogether out of date and ignorant to picture soldiering as riding about on horseback, bivouacking in forests, sleeping in tents, and dashing gallantly at the head of shining regiments in plumes and breastplates, and pounding in serried ranks against the equally serried ranks of the cruel foe, storming breaches as the “war,” in short, of Mr. Henty’s books for boys? How far does such a conception correspond to the reality—to the German conception? Even if the whole picture were not out of date, what proportion of the most military nation would ever be destined to witness it or to take part in it? Not one in ten thousand. What is the character even of military conflict but, for the most part, years of hard and steady work, somewhat mechanical, somewhat divorced from real life, but not a whit more exciting? That is true of all ranks; and in the higher ranks of the directing mind war has become an almost purely intellectual process. Was it not the late W. H. Steevens who painted Lord Kitchener as the sort of man who would have made an admirable manager of Harrod’s Stores; who fought all his battles in his study, and regarded the actual fighting as the mere culminating incident in the whole process, the dirty and noisy part of it, which he would have been glad to get away from?
The real soldiers of our time—those who represent the brain of the armies—have a life not very different from that of men of any intellectual calling; much less of physical strife than is called
