group of reformers lounging at a club cannot, dare not, decide to close
up another man's club because it is called a saloon. Unless the reformer
can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive
vices, he will fail. He will fail because human nature abhors the vacuum
created by the taboo.

An incident in the international peace propaganda illuminates this point.
Not long ago a meeting in Carnegie Hall, New York, to forward peace among
nations broke up in great disorder. Thousands of people who hate the
waste and futility of war as much as any of the orators of that evening
were filled with an unholy glee. They chuckled with delight at the idea
of a riot in a peace meeting. Though it would have seemed perverse to the
ordinary pacificist, this sentiment sprang from a respectable source. It
had the same ground as the instinctive feeling of nine men in ten that
Roosevelt has more right to talk about peace than William Howard Taft.
James made it articulate in his essay on "The Moral Equivalent of War."
James was a great advocate of peace, but he understood Theodore Roosevelt
and he spoke for the military man when he wrote of war that: "Its
'horrors' are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative
supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and
zo-ophily, of 'consumers' leagues' and 'associated charities,' of
industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness,
no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!"

And he added: "So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no
healthy minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking
of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardihood, and
human life with no use for hardihood would be contemptible. Without risks
or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a
type of military character which everyone feels that the race should
never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority."

So William James proposed not the abolition of war, but a moral
equivalent for it. He dreamed of "a conscription of the whole youthful
population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army
enlisted against _Nature_.... The military ideals of hardihood and
discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one
would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's
relations to the globe he lives on