as they always have lived, under a
pain-and-fear economy--for those of us who live in an ease-economy are
but an island in the stormy ocean--and the whole atmosphere of
present-day Utopian literature tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people
who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors. It suggests, in
truth, ubiquitous inferiority. Inferiority is always with us, and
merciless scorn of it is the keynote of the military temper. "Dogs,
would you live forever?" shouted Frederick the Great. "Yes," say our
Utopians, "let us live forever, and raise our level gradually." The
best thing about our "inferiors" to-day is that they are as tough as
nails, and physically and morally almost as insensitive. Utopianism
would see them soft and squeamish, while militarism would keep their
callousness, but transfigure it into a meritorious characteristic,
needed by "the service," and redeemed by that from the suspicion of
inferiority. All the qualities of a man acquire dignity when he knows
that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs them. If
proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in proportion. No
collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride; but it has to
be confessed that the only sentiment which the image of pacific
cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of arousing in countless worthy
breasts is shame at the idea of belonging to _such_ a collectivity. It
is obvious that the United States of America as they exist to-day
impress a mind like General Lea's as so much human blubber. Where is
the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one's
own, or another's? Where is the savage "yes" and "no," the
unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the
blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own Utopia.
I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of
some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the
war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to
definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable
criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole
nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in
intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war
becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant
ambitions will have to be replaced by