pid development of method and
appliances in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking
than to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been left
almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military apparatus
during the last few decades. The house-appliances of to-day for
example, are little better than they were fifty years ago. A house of
to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly heated by wasteful
fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of 1858. Houses a
couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places of residence,
so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or battleship of
fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those we possess;
in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now for
such superannuated things." [3]

Wells adds[4] that he thinks that the conceptions of order and
discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness,
unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which universal
military duty is now teaching European nations, will remain a permanent
acquisition, when the last ammunition has been used in the fireworks
that celebrate the final peace. I believe as he does. It would be
simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor
and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be
the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed
is Fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to
make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher
ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in public
opinion which my utopia postulates is vastly less than the difference
between the mentality of those black warriors who pursued Stanley's
party on the Congo with their cannibal war-cry of "Meat! Meat!" and
that of the "general-staff" of any civilized nation. History has seen
the latter interval bridged over: the former one can be bridged over
much more easily.

[1] Written for and first published by the Association for
International Conciliation (Leaflet No. 27) and also published in
_McClure's Magazine_, August, 1910, and _The Popular Science Monthly_,
October, 1910.

[2] "Justice and Liberty," N. Y., 1909.

[3] "First and Last Things," 1908, p. 215.

[4] "First and Last Things," 1908, p. 226.

XII

REMARKS AT THE PEACE BANQUET[1]

I am only a philosopher, and there is only