essional, 1895, p. xli.

These words are of course literally true. The immediate aim of the
soldier's life is, as Moltke said, destruction, and nothing but
destruction; and whatever constructions wars result in are remote and
non-military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too
feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for
persons or for things, that make for conservation. Yet the fact
remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being
in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is
universally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this
wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark
against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more
kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of
heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral
equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as
universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their
spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have
often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the
pedantry which infested it, there might be something like that moral
equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted
poverty be "the strenuous life," without the need of crushing weaker
peoples?

Poverty indeed IS the strenuous life--without brass bands or uniforms
or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions; and when one
sees the way in which wealth- getting enters as an ideal into the very
bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the
belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be "the
transformation of military courage," and the spiritual reform which our
time stands most in need of.

Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty
need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify
and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and
pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking
in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient
idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying
our way by what we are or do a