eys. If he is ordered to fire
on his fellow citizens, on his friends, on his neighbors, on his
relatives, he obeys without hesitation. If he is ordered to fire
down a crowded street when the poor are clamoring for bread, he
obeys, and sees the gray hair of age stained with blood and the
life tide gushing from the breast of women, feeling neither remorse
nor sympathy. If he is ordered off as one of a firing squad to
execute a hero or benefactor, he fires without hesitation, though
he knows that the bullet will pierce the noblest heart that ever
beat in a human breast.

"A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine.
He is not a man. He is not even a brute, for brutes only kill in
self-defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him,
all that constitutes the man, has been sworn away when he took the
enlistment roll. His mind, conscience, aye, his very soul, is in
the keeping of his officer."

This language will appeal to many as extremely violent, yet it is no
stronger than that of Tolstoi, while Bernard Shaw used almost identical
expressions in his Preface to "John Bull's Other Island," without
anybody suggesting that they were treasonable.

"The soldier," said Shaw, "is an anachronism of which we must get
rid. Among people who are proof against the suggestions of romantic
fiction there can no longer be any question of the fact that
military service produces moral imbecility, ferocity, and
cowardice.... For permanent work the soldier is worse than useless;
such efficiency as he has is the result of dehumanization and
disablement. His whole training tends to make him a weakling. He
has the easiest of lives; he has no freedom and no responsibility.
He is politically and socially a child, with rations instead of
rights, treated like a child, punished like a child, dressed
prettily and washed and combed like a child, excused for outbreaks
like a child, forbidden to marry like a child, and called Tommy
like a child. He has no real work to keep him from going mad except
housemaid's work."

Mr. Shaw's words are identical with those that are preached by
Socialists every day, especially on the Continent.

"No soldier is asked to think for himself," he says, "to judge for
himself, to consult his own honor and manhood, to dread any