ray into time out of eternity.

Yet we have much to learn from the study of military organization. The
great problem of all civilizations is the creation of citizens: that
is, of people who are dominated by the ideal of the general welfare,
who will sink private desire and work harmoniously with their
fellow-citizens for the highest good of their race. While we may all
agree that war brings about an eruption of the arcane and elemental
forces which lie normally in the pit of human life, as the forces which
cause earthquakes lie normally asleep in the womb of the world, none the
less we must admit that military genius has discovered and applied
with mastery a law of life which is of the highest importance to
civilization--far more important to civil even than to military
development--and that is the means by which the individual will forget
his personal danger and sacrifice life itself for the general welfare.
In no other organization will men in great masses so entirely forget
themselves as men will in battle under military discipline. What is the
cause of this? Can we discover how it is done and apply the law to civil
life?

The military discipline works miracles. The problem before the captains
of armies is to take the body of man, the most naturally egoistic of
all things, which hates pain and which will normally take to its legs in
danger and try to save itself, and to dominate it so that the body and
the soul inhabiting it will stand still and face all it loathes. And the
problem is solved in the vast majority of cases. After military training
the civilians who formerly would fly before a few policemen will
manfully and heroically stand, not the blows of a baton, but a whole
hail of bullets, a cannonade lasting through a day; nay, they will for
weeks and months, day by day, risk and lose life for a cause, for an
idea, at a word of command. They may not have half as good a cause to
lose life for as they had as a mob of angry civilians, but they will
face death now, and the chances of mutilation and agony worse
than death. Can we inspire civilians with the same passionate
self-forgetfulness in the pursuit of the higher ideals of peace? Men in
a regiment have to a large extent the personal interests abolished. The
organization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life. By
their union with it a new being is created. Exercise, drill, maneuver,
accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that the