the
innermost recesses of Japanese mentality, we may be foolhardy to
disregard such possibilities.

Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their
considerations. The "Philosophie des Krieges," by S. R. Steinmetz is a
good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted
by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential
form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ
all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save
as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some
vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity,
heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth,
physical health and vigor--there is n't a moral or intellectual point
of superiority that does n't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls
the peoples upon one another. _Die Weltgeschichte ist das
Weltgericht_; and Dr. Steinmetz does not believe that in the long run
chance and luck play any part in apportioning the issues.

The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow,
superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military
competition; but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the
latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal
is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men
into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature
adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is
"degeneration."

Dr. Steinmetz is a conscientious thinker, and his book, short as it is,
takes much into account. Its upshot can, it seems to me, be summed up
in Simon Patten's word, that mankind was nursed in pain and fear, and
that the transition to a "pleasure-economy" may be fatal to a being
wielding no powers of defence against its disintegrative influences.
If we speak of the _fear of emancipation from the fear-regime_, we put
the whole situation into a single phrase; fear regarding ourselves now
taking the place of the ancient fear of the enemy.

Turn the fear over as I will in my mind, it all seems to lead back to
two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one aesthetic, and the other
moral; unwillingness, first to envisage a future in which army-life,
with its many elements of charm, shall be forever impossible, and in
which the destinies of peoples shall nevermore be decided, quickly,
thrillingly, and tragically, by force, but