anwhile--and here comes the horror of it--our technical
instruction is honest and efficient. The public schoolboy who is
carefully blinded, duped, and corrupted as to the nature of a society
based on profiteering, and is taught to honor parasitic idleness and
luxury, learns to shoot and ride and keep fit with all the assistance
and guidance that can be procured for him by the most anxiously sincere
desire that he may do these things well, and if possible superlatively
well. In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns
to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is
rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,
battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied
destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,
and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers
of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to
infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of
romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by
education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a
religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless
under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic
terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,
commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own
industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the
money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely
because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple
purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of
public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting
ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune
because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford
to pay the piper. Neither the rulers nor the ruled understand high
politics. They do not even know that there is such a branch of knowledge
as political science; but between them they can coerce and enslave
with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,
because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly
carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is
nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible
powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people sub