obedience, order, respect for authority and law, by which military
training conveys a potent antidote to lawlessness, it still would
remain a mistake, plausible but utter, to see in the hoped-for
subsidence of the military spirit in the nations of Europe a pledge of
surer progress of the world towards universal peace, general material
prosperity, and ease. That alluring, albeit somewhat ignoble, ideal is
not to be attained by the representatives of civilization dropping
their arms, relaxing the tension of their moral muscle, and from
fighting animals becoming fattened cattle fit only for slaughter.

When Carthage fell, and Rome moved onward, without an equal enemy
against whom to guard, to the dominion of the world of Mediterranean
civilization, she approached and gradually realized the reign of
universal peace, broken only by those intestine social and political
dissensions which are finding their dark analogues in our modern times
of infrequent war. As the strife between nations of that civilization
died away, material prosperity, general cultivation and luxury,
flourished, while the weapons dropped nervelessly from their palsied
arms. The genius of Caesar, in his Gallic and Germanic campaigns, built
up an outside barrier, which, like a dike, for centuries postponed the
inevitable end, but which also, like every artificial barrier, gave
way when the strong masculine impulse which first created it had
degenerated into that worship of comfort, wealth, and general
softness, which is the ideal of the peace prophets of to-day. The wave
of the invaders broke in,--the rain descended, the floods came, the
winds blew, and beat upon the house, and it fell, because not founded
upon the rock of virile reliance upon strong hands and brave hearts to
defend what was dear to them.

Ease unbroken, trade uninterrupted, hardship done away, all roughness
removed from life,--these are our modern gods; but can they deliver
us, should we succeed in setting them up for worship? Fortunately, as
yet we cannot do so. We may, if we will, shut our eyes to the vast
outside masses of aliens to our civilization, now powerless because we
still, with a higher material development, retain the masculine
combative virtues which are their chief possession; but, even if we
disregard them, the ground already shakes beneath our feet with
physical menace of destruction from within, against which the only
security is in constant readiness to contend. In the r