rong
men, and many a man who might have made a good blacksmith or barman
may be turned into a sailor. The situation is so absurd that it does
not bear thinking about except as a game: the military aristocracies
who treat preparation for war as a form of sport are in this entirely
logical. On the other hand, when the burgess fulminates against war as
though it were the only example of wasted human energy that does not
bear thinking of, he is shutting his eyes to the fact that the whole
of modern civilisation is built upon a foundation of waste where it is
not built upon a foundation of want.

Our estimates of men and nations rise and fall with their capacity for
waste. The great nation, in the eyes of the Imperialist, is the nation
that can waste the world. It is the nation that can mow down harvests
of savages without even the comparatively decent excuse that it wants
to eat them. It is the nation that can make the genius of other
nations as though it were not--that can ruin harbours and send ships
worth a million pounds to the bottom of the sea. I do not say that
there are not other elements that have a part in the greatness of
nations. But the power of destruction alone is enough to make any
nation supreme for a day--and the supremacy of no nation lasts much
longer--and remembered in history. Similarly, with individual men and
women. "Everybody," said Emerson, "loves a lover." It would be almost
truer to say that everybody loves a wastrel. In our boyhood we love
those who waste themselves. In our discreeter years we envy those who
can waste the lives of others. It has often been noticed that youths
and maidens have a tenderness for drunkards and rakes. They reverence
the genius of life wasted almost more than the genius of life
fulfilled. Byron, whose vices killed him in his thirties; Sydney
Carton, who was seldom sober; Mr Kipling's gentleman-rankers, "damned
from here to eternity"--these awake a passionate devotion in the
breasts of the young such as is never lavished on successful grocers.
It is the prodigal son, and not his respectable brother, at whom
affectionate eyes look round as he passes along the street. Perhaps it
is because he is so much more obviously trying a fall with destiny
than the grocer. The mark of doom makes a more picturesque effect on
the brow than a silk-lined bowler hat. According to this view, the
wastrel owes his appeal largely to the fact that he is a fighter in a
lost cause--the cause o