We come at last to the practical question as to how these substitutes for the war virtues may be found. How may we, the children of an industrial and commercial age, find the courage and sacrifice which belong to our industrialism. We may begin with August Comte's assertion that man seeks to improve his position in two different ( 218) ways, by the destruction of obstacles and by the construction of means, or, designated by their most obvious social results, if his contention is correct, by military action and by industrial action, and that the two must long continue side by side. Then we find ourselves asking what may be done to make more picturesque those lives which are spent in a monotonous and wearing toil, compared to which the camp is exciting and the barracks comfortable. How shall it be made to seem as magnificent patiently to correct the wrongs of industrialism as to do battle for the rights of the nation? This transition ought not to be so difficult in America, for to begin with, our national life in America has been largely founded upon our success in invention and engineering, in manufacturing and commerce. Our prosperity has rested upon constructive labor and material progress, both of them in striking contrast to warfare.
There is an element of almost grim humor in the nation's reverting at last to the outworn methods of battle-ships and defended harbors. We may admit that idle men need war to keep alive their courage and endurance, but we have few idle men in a nation engaged in industrialism. We constantly see subordination of sensation to sentiment in hundreds of careers which are not military; the thousands of miners ( 219) in Pennsylvania doubtless endure every year more bodily pain and peril than the same number of men in European barracks.
Industrial life affords ample opportunity for endurance, discipline, and a sense of detachment, if the struggle is really put upon the highest level of industrial efficiency. But because our industrial life is not on this level, we constantly tend to drop the newer and less developed ideals for the older ones of warfare, we ignore the fact that war so readily throws back the ideals which the young are nourishing into the mold of those which the old should be outgrowing. It lures young men not to develop, but to exploit; it turns them from the courage and toil of industry to the bravery and endurance of war, and leads them to forget that civilization is the substitution of law for war. It incites their ambitions, not to irrigate, to make fertile and sanitary, the barren plain of the savage, but to fill it with military posts and taxgatherers, to cease from pushing forward industrial action into new fields and to fall back upon military action.
We may illustrate this by the most beneficent acts of war, when the military spirit claiming to carry forward civilization invades a country for the purpose of bringing it into the zone of the civilized world. Militarism enforces law and ( 220) order and insists upon obedience and discipline, assuming that it will ultimately establish righteousness and foster progress.
In order to carry out this good intention, it first of all clears the decks of impedimenta, although in the process it may extinguish the most precious beginnings of self- government and the nucleus of self-help, which the wise of the native community have long been anxiously hoarding.
It is the military idea, resting content as it does with the passive results of order and discipline, which confesses a totally inadequate conception of the value and power of human life. The charge of obtaining negative results could with great candor he brought against militarism, while the strenuous task, the vigorous and difficult undertaking, involving the use of the most highly developed human powers, can be claimed for industrialism.
It is really human constructive labor which' must give the newly invaded country a sense of its place in the life of the civilized world, some idea of the effective occupations which it may perform. In order to accomplish this its energy must be freed and its resources developed. Militarism undertakes to set in order, to suppress and to govern, if necessary to destroy, while industrialism undertakes to liberate latent forces, to ( 221) reconcile them to new conditions, to demonstrate that their aroused activities can no longer follow caprice, but must fit into a larger order of life. To call this latter undertaking, demanding ever new powers of insight, patience, and fortitude, less difficult, less manly, less strenuous, than the first, is on the face of it absurd. It is the soldier who is inadequate to the difficult task, who strews his ways with blunders and lost opportunities, who cannot justify his vocation by the results, and who is obliged to plead guilty to a lack of rational method.
