only gradually and insipidly
by "evolution"; and, secondly, unwillingness to see the supreme theatre
of human strenuousness closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of
men doomed to keep always in a state of latency and never show
themselves in action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than
other aesthetic and ethical insistencies, have, it seems to me, to be
listened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by mere
counter-insistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The horror makes
the thrill; and when the question is of getting the extremest and
supremest out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. The
weakness of so much merely negative criticism is evident--pacificism
makes no converts from the military party. The military party denies
neither the bestiality nor the horror, nor the expense; it only says
that these things tell but half the story. It only says that war is
_worth_ them; that, taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its
best protection against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that
mankind cannot _afford_ to adopt a peace-economy.

Pacificists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical
point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any controversy,
says J. J. Chapman, then _move the point_, and your opponent will
follow. So long as anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's
disciplinary function, no _moral equivalent_ of war, analogous, as one
might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail to
realize the full inwardness of the situation. And as a rule they do
fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the Utopias
they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded.
Tolstoi's pacificism is the only exception to this rule, for it is
profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world's values, and makes
the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the
fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe
absolutely in this world's values; and instead of the fear of the Lord
and the fear of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear
of poverty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic
literature with which I am acquainted. Even in Lowes Dickinson's
exquisite dialogue,[2] high wages and short hours are the only forces
invoked for overcoming man's distaste for repulsive kinds of labor.
Meanwhile men at large still live