from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it
is not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if the
conditions of life are propitious, we observe a people's energies
bursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength they
have stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is the
unmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the best
survive, while in war it is often the best that perish) that descends
victoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies
at the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epoch
and is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, and
merged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in
some other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable of
victory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of courage and
virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

[Sidenote: Military virtues.]

Military institutions, adventitious and ill-adapted excrescences as they
usually are, can acquire rational values in various ways. Besides
occasional defence, they furnish a profession congenial to many, and a
spectacle and emotion interesting to all. Blind courage is an animal
virtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a
certain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice
without vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather
than desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of
virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of
steadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as
there is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to
be one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is
unavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to
face. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler's instinct, with a love of
hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already
to be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight
in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain,
and a positive crime in the statesman.

Discipline, or the habit of obedience, is a better sort of courage which
military life also requires. Discipline is the acquired faculty of
surrendering an immediate personal good for the sake of a remote and
impersonal one of greater value. This dif