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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 ERNEST CARROLL MOORE
 
 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 BY 
 
 H. E. WARNER 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL UNION 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, BOSTON 
 
 190S
 
 Copyright, 1905 
 By H. E. WARNER 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This little volume had its origin in a series of papers 
 read to the p:thical Club of Washington, D.C., at the 
 time just preceding and following the Spanish War. As 
 it was designed that each should present its special topic 
 with a degree of completeness, it was often necessary at 
 the beginning of successive papers to outline the preced- 
 ing. It is hoped that such repetitions are not greater 
 than is desirable to keep the whole subject well in mind. 
 While the chapters are in a sense independent, they relate 
 to different phases of the same subject. The popular 
 conceptions of heroism and patriotism are tremendous 
 factors in every war. Differing widely as I do from 
 these popular conceptions, any inference that I hold the 
 things themselves at a lower valuation than others would 
 be most erroneous. What I desire is that the conceptions 
 be recast in the mold of the highest rationality. 
 
 To forestall any misconception as to my animus, it 
 may be permissible to mention a circumstance to which 
 I should not otherwise allude. It was my fortune, and in 
 some respects my privilege, to serve in the ranks during 
 the Civil War. Shortly after enlistment I had an attack 
 of fever which nearly proved fatal. This was followed 
 by a brief captivity, in which I had a taste of about all 
 the forms of discomfort which could be had. A year 
 
 i .^dR1 15
 
 iv PREFACE 
 
 later a bullet, having deprived me of an important mem- 
 ber, terminated my active service, but added many 
 months to my hospital experience. After this I rounded 
 out my military career with another fever. If not much 
 glory fell to my share, I had certainly an almost unique 
 opportunity of seeing war on its seamy side. In spite 
 of this, I am sure that my attitude toward it is not in 
 the least based upon personal grounds. It should be 
 clear, too, that I cannot possibly lack appreciation of 
 and sympathy for the soldier. I may indeed confess 
 that I have not succeeded wholly in ridding myself of 
 the irrational sentiment which attaches itself to the con- 
 cepts "heroism" and "patriotism," though these are 
 not now satisfied by spelling the words with a capital 
 letter nor by the bursting of firecrackers. 
 
 I am under no illusion that this book will have many 
 readers or exert any remarkable influence. A few will, 
 I trust, sympathize with my purpose and find in my 
 labor of love some stimulus for further effort and fresher 
 hope for the race. However this may be, every man 
 born into the world owes it to himself to express, in 
 some way, his deepest convictions ; and this debt I have 
 endeavored to pay.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Introduction i 
 
 II. The Ethics OF Heroism ii 
 
 III. The Ethics OF Patriotism 38 
 
 IV. Can War be defended on the Authority of 
 
 Christ? 65 
 
 V. Can War BE defended on Grounds OF Reason? . 82 
 VI. Some Objections 107
 
 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 That war, in modern times, whatever may have been 
 true in the past, is an enormous economic mistake will 
 hardly be questioned by any well-informed person. Why, 
 then, among civilized peoples in whom the commercial 
 instincts are strong, not to say predominant, does it 
 continue ? Partly, no doubt, because it is regarded as 
 inevitable. It is one of the mysterious dispensations of 
 Providence, against which it is held to be useless to strive, 
 and of which it is wrong to complain. Mainly, however, 
 it is because the mass of men fail to realize its burden, 
 or upon whom the burden falls. The government, they 
 somehow think, provides for it. It may be the galled 
 jade, but their withers are unwrung. Our system of 
 indirect taxation, which also prevails in most countries, 
 helps to conceal the facts. If its costs could be rendered 
 in tax bills, to be paid like state, county, and school taxes, 
 war would at once lose most of its popularity. Could it 
 further be realized that every man, woman, and child 
 born into the world, property holders or not, directly or 
 indirectly share in its losses and wastes, it would lose
 
 2 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 the rest of it. There would remain a few who, trading 
 upon the necessities of the government in the deranged 
 conditions of affairs and realizing a profit greater than 
 their share in the burdens, would still be in favor of war, 
 quite irrespective of the controversies out of which it 
 might arise. 
 
 Still, these are mainly negative reasons and hardly 
 explain the origin of a particular war, as, for example, 
 the recent war in South Africa. To say that it was due 
 to the greed of the British Government or to the obsti- 
 nacy of President Kruger is easy; but for a nation to 
 pay for a possession or privilege ten times more than it 
 is worth, or for another to court annihilation rather than 
 to make a reasonable concession, points not so much to 
 greed and stubbornness as to stupidity. 
 
 In fact, wars are rarely designed. Selfishness and 
 greed on the part of individuals, in both parties to the 
 controversy, exist ; but neither the governments nor the 
 persons responsible for the conduct of public business 
 may have anything at stake. Interests clash, and some 
 method of adjustment must be found. This is true every- 
 where : but if the parties are citizens of the same govern- 
 ment, questions between them are settled in the domestic 
 courts ; if of different governments, no adequate machin- 
 ery exists for the purpose, and until the recent estab- 
 lishment of The Hague Court none has existed at all. 
 The governments themselves come to the aid of their 
 citizens and make themselves parties to the dispute. 
 Each claims more than it is entitled to receive, intending 
 to make graceful concessions for the sake of substantial 
 gains. Meantime the commercial interests are insistent
 
 INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 and clamorous for the whole, urghig the government to 
 extreme positions. In domestic affairs this would not 
 even be thought of; but their adversaries are foreigners, 
 to whom they owe no duty, not even that of courtesy. 
 The governments are under no compulsion. They can go 
 to war without violating international law. Finally, a 
 point is reached, unexpectedly, where the national honor 
 is involved, and nothing is left but mutual destruction. 
 
 But the conception of national honor has been derived 
 from the ideas of heroism and patriotism still found under 
 high civilization. How have these come about .-' We say 
 sometimes they have been perverted. On the contrary, 
 they are only too faithful a transmission of those which 
 prevailed under a lower culture. They have not developed 
 to meet the changed conditions of life. 
 
 Governments do not act upon the highest intelligence 
 of the community, but upon a composite, called public 
 opinion. Perhaps in a degree they cannot do otherwise ; 
 but it is most unfortunate if those in authority have no 
 higher standard, intellectual and moral, than that of the 
 average citizen. However this may be, it is clearly futile 
 to hope for the cessation of war through a reahzation of its 
 wickedness. Wicked for whom ? The enemy, of course, 
 always. But if the mass of men can be brought to see 
 its expensiveness, not to a figment called government, 
 but to themselves, to see that national honor does not 
 necessarily require the destruction of persons living 
 under another government, with whom they may differ, 
 and that an economical way of settling these differences 
 is in actual use or perfectly practicable, then war will 
 cease.
 
 4 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 I have everywhere assumed that conditions existing at 
 any period of human history are the results of an evolu- 
 tionary process ; but I have here no concern for the theory 
 of evolution itself, nor for the principle to which it owes 
 its efficiency. As to this I claim no right to speak. I 
 was slow to accept evolution as relates to the origin of 
 species. Like the man mentioned by Mr. Fiske, I refused 
 to be called a mammal or the son of a mammal. I was 
 unwilling to recognize my remote simian ancestor, not 
 to speak of tracing descent from a speck of protoplasm. 
 I first observed its process in the law, the manner in 
 which legal principles are evolved, and through which 
 they take shapes widely different from those in which 
 they began. Further consideration showed the same 
 principle at work in language, literature, philosophy, 
 religion, and finally in all forms of social organization. 
 Not that all changes are beneficial. A condition at a 
 given time may be leading forward or backward. The 
 law of the survival of the fittest provides at the same 
 time for the destruction of the unfit. Ideas and institu- 
 tions grow, culminate, and disappear, in obedience to this 
 law. That it exists in some form in the world of thoug-ht 
 and social order there cannot be the slightest ques- 
 tion, although Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley all came to 
 the conclusion that the " survival of the fittest" did. not 
 account for the mind of man, Mr. Huxley especially ex- 
 cluding the aesthetic and ethical sense. It should be 
 remembered, however, that these men were employed, 
 in the main, with the study of physical forms and organ- 
 isms rather than with psychic and social development, 
 and that they had no special qualification for the latter
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 task. Herbert Spencer has applied a form of it to 
 account for all ideas, institutions, and social forms ; 
 but his conclusions have not generally been accepted. 
 The principle of utility, in its usual aspect, is not enough 
 to account for the compulsory force in evolution, which 
 takes into its gxasp men and things, and compels changes 
 unforeseen and undesired. 
 
 This coercive force Mr. Kidd finds in the religious 
 sanction. Religion he defines as " a form of belief pro- 
 viding an ultra-rational sanction for that large class of 
 conduct in the individual where his interests and the 
 interests of the social organism are antagonistic, and 
 by which the former are subordinated to the latter in 
 the general interests of the evolution which the race is 
 undergoing." This definition is defective in at least one 
 respect, as it is the application of the principle of religion 
 to a certain line of conduct which the definition contem- 
 plates, not the nature of religion itself. More recently 
 Mr. Kidd has supplemented his theory with the doctrine 
 of projected efficiency, — that is, that an individual or 
 group must not only be fitted to survive in the conditions 
 prevailing in the present, but in those which will prevail in 
 the future. In the movement of the race one who drops 
 out of the ranks is doomed. This, it will be seen, applies 
 more to the social groups than to individuals, whose lives 
 are too short to feel the application of the principle in its 
 full extent. 
 
 Mr. Fiske recognized the process of evolution in the 
 formation of ideas and in the social order, but he con- 
 ceived that in some way there had been a break or 
 change of direction, from which he argues that man is
 
 6 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 the highest product of evolution and that, the physical 
 form having been perfected, the process is now at work 
 on the mental and moral nature, and that the psychic 
 nature is or will be so far developed that it will be able 
 to survive the loss of the physical organism. 
 
 Whatever the validity of the argument for immortality, 
 I do not believe there has been any break or change of 
 direction in the process of evolution ; nor do I agree 
 vv^ith Mr. Kidd that an ultra-rational factor forms its 
 coercive power. That religion has in it an ultra-rational 
 element is, I believe, true, as also that it has exercised an 
 enormous and incalculable influence on the race; but 
 religion as much as anything else is a product of evolu- 
 tion. The objection to Mr. Kidd's view, as to that of 
 Mr. Fiske, is that at a given period — the advent of man 
 in the world — the law of evolution has had imposed upon 
 it from the outside a new character or force. No objec- 
 tion is made to the theistic assumption, as I think we 
 must make that in any case. It lies at the very base 
 of reasoning. We can only reason in terms of cause 
 and effect. Evolution in no way explains origins. The 
 process itself was somewhere instituted and put to work 
 in the universe. The " power not ourselves which makes 
 for righteousness " it is at least convenient to call God. 
 But having established a process which has been at work 
 during the entire period of the world's history and which 
 still rigorously holds man in its grasp — his physical as 
 well as his psychic nature — and controls all the move- 
 ments of society, it is not only unwarranted by any evi- 
 dence whatever, but illogical, to suppose that He has 
 superseded it or given it a new force or direction. If we
 
 INTRODUCTION / 
 
 cannot see in just what way it has evolved the aesthetic 
 or ethical sense, neither can we see just how it has 
 developed the sense of sight or hearing. We only infer 
 that it has done so by comparing conditions known 
 to have existed at long intervals. There is no question 
 that, once evolved, these and all other senses and facul- 
 ties are useful, and that they are developed and strength- 
 ened by use. The hand with its grasping power was not 
 a ready-made device with which man was endowed, but 
 was developed by the use of the tools and weapons which 
 he handled. They in turn were developed in connection 
 with the employment of the hand. The possession of 
 reason and sagacity by man at the period when his social 
 development began is assumed by Mr. Kidd as a reason 
 for placing man's evolution in a class by itself ; but 
 reason and sagacity had their origin among animals far 
 below man, and have developed with their use. 
 
 The view I have undertaken to present is that men- 
 tality, beyond that rudimentary form of it found in the 
 lower orders, grew out of the necessity of supplementing 
 a feeble physical power and inefficient natural weapons 
 with cunning in man's competition with more powerful 
 animals. The ethical sense grew out of the realized 
 advantage of combination. But two men each intent on 
 killing and devouring the other cannot combine. For 
 this a basis of confidence is necessary. To disarm sus- 
 picion by a simulated kindness would, though the kindness 
 were temporary, be an advantage, and this through repe- 
 tition would by and by become instinctive. If not very 
 deep, it would in time have pretty well defined areas of 
 employment, and could, within these limits, be trusted.
 
 8 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 Thus, without design or expectation, altruism would com- 
 mence its mission in the world, destined in the end, 
 by its utility, to overshadow all the advantages which 
 could be gained from individual effort and to subordinate 
 the selfish and self-interested desires. 
 
 I do not think that any other principle than utility, in 
 a very wide sense, is necessary to explain this ; but 
 there is something in the application of it to which I 
 wish to call a moment's attention. It is that utility itself 
 is an ever-changing quantity, as it is, like everything, 
 under the law of the survival of the fittest. The thing 
 which to-day is useful may to-morrow be useless and an 
 encumbrance. Our utilities are not usually foreseen, but 
 are the result of something like accident. A principle 
 thus revealed is wrought out by actual and repeated 
 trials, and usually with many failures. Once fairly 
 attained, if it is a utility, that with which it competes 
 becomes an inutility. It is not enough that a device can 
 secure something in itself useful : it must secure the 
 most useful result attainable. The old process of steel 
 making ceased to be useful with the discovery of the 
 Bessemer process. The whole road of industrial prog- 
 ress is strewn with the wreckage of obsolete utilities. 
 This, I believe, brings us pretty well into line with Mr. 
 Kidd's doctrine of projected efficiency. What I have 
 said about man living under artificial conditions and 
 making his own environment is quite in harmony with it, 
 if not identical. 
 
 On the other hand, a thing useful to high intelligence 
 is worthless or a danger to a less disciplined or experi- 
 enced mind. An automobile or a can of nitroglycerin
 
 INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 would be anything but useful to an Andaman islander. 
 The understanding of its use is as necessary as its 
 capacity to perform a certain work or function. Thus 
 we may see that from the inception of the simplest form 
 of life up to its highest there has been struggle and 
 reaction, — life upon its environment and environment 
 upon life. With man, not quite for the first time, but in 
 a practical and large sense, there began an era of par- 
 tially artificial environment, which nevertheless gave its 
 reaction to his struggle just as the natural one had. 
 Man ceased to compete to a great extent with the lower 
 animals and began to compete with himself. There is 
 no danger of deterioration for lack of opportunity for 
 struggle. On the contrary, this seems to grow more des- 
 perate from generation to generation. 
 
 Nor does it appear that the law of the survival of the 
 fittest has been suspended, as applied to the physical 
 organism, in the artificial environment of society, as has 
 been sometimes thought. The physical perfection of 
 individuals, destined to become the natural leaders of 
 the group in trials of pure physical strength and agility, 
 is no longer necessary, and the process has perhaps 
 ceased, though this is not very clear ; but that the 
 whole group is more efficient in this sense seems to be 
 shown by the lengthened period of life. Mere strength 
 has not always been a utility, even under the conditions 
 of purely animal life. The cave bear and lion, the mam- 
 moth, great saurians, and fishes have perished, their very 
 size probably making it harder to supply themselves with 
 food. The competition which has gone on was not only 
 between individuals but between species. This is why
 
 10 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 the record of the rocks proclaims " a thousand types are 
 gone." If man is to continue at the head of creation, it 
 will be through eternal struggle and adaptation to his 
 environment, slowly changing by his own efforts, pur- 
 posive and undesigned. Whether in the future of life 
 upon the earth he shall be " sealed within the iron hills," 
 and a nobler type succeed him, we are in no position to 
 say. There is nothing now to suggest it, nor is it a mat- 
 ter of practical concern. But the changes of that future, 
 if it shall in any way compare with the measureless past, 
 where the horologue of time ticked off the eons, we 
 cannot dimly conjecture.
 
 II 
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 
 
 A hero, as defined by Worcester, is "a man distin- 
 guished for valor, or for war-like achievements, a great 
 warrior, a brave man." The bravery contemplated is ani- 
 mal daring exerted in the sphere of physical conflict; it 
 is brute courage employed in the destruction of life 
 or property, whether for purpose of defense or plunder. 
 From the beginnings of the race this kind of courage 
 has been held in extraordinary esteem. In the progress 
 of mankind other qualities have come in for a qualified 
 admiration, but this quality in all times, among all races, 
 tribes, and nations, has called for the instinctive and vocif- 
 erous applause of men. Not those who add to the com- 
 fort, safety, and well-being of others, but they who inflict 
 pain, injury, wounds, and death are the envy of men and 
 the idols of women. The Homeric tale of Venus desert- 
 ing her skillful and ingenious spouse for the red-handed 
 Mars is fairly typical. Though like courage and endur- 
 ance be required, he is no hero who merely constructs, 
 but he who destroys. He may, indeed, be the defender 
 of his tribe or clan, or its leader against a neighboring 
 tribe, but even if successful, that alone brings but a 
 qualified approbation. That which appeals to his fellows 
 is the spectacular bravery which seeks opportunities to 
 display itself, delights in fighting for the demonstration
 
 12 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 of superiority, and in taking life and shedding blood as a 
 dexterity. To complete the heroic ideal, he must bear 
 his own life lightly and yield it up gayly where the 
 chances go against him or his adversary proves to be 
 the greater hero. 
 
 Here, indeed, is the fatal infirmity of the glory of 
 combat. Every hero is doomed, sooner or later, through 
 faihng powers or uncontrollable circumstances, to defeat. 
 The suitors in the Odyssey, brutal, repellent as they are, 
 boastful, swaggering, cruel to the weak, were neverthe- 
 less heroes according to the definition, and fairly entitled 
 to their high-sounding epithets. It is not for their cruelty 
 or barbarity, for lack of skill or courage, that the poet 
 holds them up for our disapprobation. It is merely that 
 they had trespassed on the preserves of a still greater 
 hero. Ulysses was no whit less savage or cruel, but he 
 was stronger and more skillful in taking life. 
 
 Goliath was to the Israelites a savage monstrosity, but 
 an unparalleled hero to the Philistines until his glory was 
 appropriated by the shepherd lad. There were heroes of 
 this type in David's bodyguard also. Chancing to hear 
 their leader sigh for a drink of water from a certain 
 spring, they broke through the Philistine lines to obtain 
 it. David, however, had other qualities than daring, and 
 had no mind to sacrifice his valuable material in any 
 such feather-headed enterprise, and he turned the water 
 on the ground in token of his disapproval of it. The 
 story of the cavalier who sprang into the arena among 
 the lions to rescue the glove of his lady is in point. The 
 grain of sense which, in fact, he showed was in throwing 
 the glove in her face. But while in history, romance,
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 13 
 
 song, and folklore the hero has always been glorified, it 
 is among the Norsemen that the apotheosis of courage 
 has been attained. No higher ideal of happiness or 
 reward in the future life was found than that their 
 heroes should hack each other to pieces every day, to be 
 restored again at night, that this grim joy might go on 
 forever. 
 
 There is, however, another element in the heroic ideal, 
 or at least in the popular conception of the hero. The 
 man who is slain may be just as brave as his adversary, 
 and only less skillful, but scant admiration is wasted on 
 him. To win unstinted applause one must succeed. The 
 hero is such only while he is victorious. Success does 
 as a rule carry with it the idea of physical perfection. 
 In primitive times, when the combat was determined 
 solely by force, the hero must needs be the stronger 
 man. If stratagem, surprise, concealment, or duplicity 
 were factors, he must also excel in these ; if skill in the 
 use of arms, that, too, must be superadded. Finally, mys- 
 terious virtues in the weapons themselves became an 
 element in the conception. Supernatural aid seems only 
 to heighten the admiration for the one who thus over- 
 comes his adversary. The gods come to the rescue of 
 the heroes in the Iliad, and David had the assistance of 
 the all-powerful Jahveh. Durandal, the sword of Roland, 
 possessed supernatural qualities in itself, and was first 
 given to Charlemagne by an angel. When men came to 
 fight on horseback their steeds shared semi-divine honors 
 with them. In brief, as the facilities for taking life 
 increased, it was necessary for the hero to be equipped 
 with all the latest improvements. In the fine art of
 
 14 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 slaughter he must needs excel in his person, his charac- 
 teristics, and his arms. Though bravery was a chief 
 means of accomplishment, it was success that won ap- 
 plause, and it did not much matter how the factors 
 contributing to it were proportioned to each other. It 
 was a practical end or utility which was sought. It was 
 merely a case of the survival of the fittest. The hero 
 was the one who was better fitted than his opponents 
 to resist the influences from without tending to the 
 destruction of life. 
 
 But while physical courage has been the most 
 applauded of human qualities, it has been the most com- 
 mon, I may say redundant. All men have not been 
 heroes, because all cannot successfully compete with 
 their fellows. Almost all men have desired to be, and 
 have failed not for lack of courage but from the limita- 
 tions of their physical organism. Only one in a group 
 can stand at the head ; but never does a leader fall but 
 plenty of his followers press eagerly forward to contend 
 for the dangerous honor of taking his place. Never was 
 a hope so forlorn that more men than enough have not 
 dedicated their lives to the slender chance of its success. 
 Lord Roberts gives a picturesque illustration where, at 
 the relief of Lucknow, the guns had made a breach in a 
 wall just large enough for a man to squeeze through. 
 Scores of men raced for the opening, each one knowing 
 perfectly that the winner would be shot dead as he 
 passed through. 
 
 But in this form of courage the civilized man is not 
 superior to the savage. He is probably decidedly inferior, 
 but, because of his greater knowledge of the forces of
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 15 
 
 nature, he is a far more formidable instrumentality for 
 the destruction of life and property. Nor does man in 
 any stage of culture possess this courage in a higher 
 degree than the brutes. The reverse is the case ; and, 
 indeed, the lower we descend in the scale, the more 
 completely all moral considerations, all perceptions of 
 consequence are eliminated, the more absolute, uncom- 
 promising, and inflexible it becomes. To this there are 
 apparent exceptions, but these admit of easy explana- 
 tions. The animals to whom we attribute gentleness 
 and timidity, in a state of nature, will be found unpro- 
 vided with the means of contending with the more 
 savage and so-called courageous beasts on anything like 
 equal terms. These will usually be found to have devel- 
 oped qualities which are an admirable substitute, — 
 fleetness of foot or wing to enable them to escape pur- 
 suit, superior cunning, means of concealment or of occu- 
 pying positions out of the reach of their antagonists. 
 But even among these, displays of the most absolute 
 daring are not at all rare. The wren, we are told on 
 excellent authority, will "peck at the estridge"; and we 
 know that the humming-bird, that tiny bit of darting 
 color, does not hesitate, under certain circumstances, to 
 attack the lord of creation. Among the savage and 
 cruel sorts the same principle may be observed. The 
 wolf is accused of cowardice where he really uses judg- 
 ment. He has the intelligence to measure the resources 
 of his antagonist, and by himself will not attack a creature 
 for which he is no match. But with his fellows he attacks 
 the most formidable antagonist, and does not shrink from 
 the wholesale destruction around him, nor from pains,
 
 l6 THE ETHICS OF P^ORCE 
 
 wounds, and death to himself. The lemming in his 
 migrations stops at nothing ; woe to the man or animal 
 that stands in the way of the stream rolling on to the 
 sea to lose itself in the waves. Even ants will attack 
 large animals or men, and by their numbers overcome 
 them. In their battles with other tribes they show the 
 most incredible hardihood. They do not stop for the 
 loss of legs and wings and the most frightful wounds. 
 When the mandibles of another have severed the head 
 of one of these warriors from his body he gives up 
 the fight. 
 
 If, now, we observe the line of development, we shall 
 see why physical courage was at its height among the 
 lower orders. In these life fairly swarms, while the means 
 for its maintenance, apart from other forms of life, are 
 wanting. We have, therefore, the alternative presented 
 to the three men of Bristol city: "Us must eat we." 
 All life, indeed, subsists upon life, but here there are no 
 removes, no disguises. It is a direct and square contest 
 between two individuals as to which can and will eat 
 the other. Even if the weaker should escape for a time 
 through flight or concealment, his necessities drive him 
 to attack another. Ultimately the strong will be pitted 
 against the strong. 
 
 The food supply was for a long time almost the sole 
 question, and remained so long after the advent of man. 
 It is only in very recent times that any demand arose for 
 clothing or for shelter other than that which nature fur- 
 nished ready made. For an immeasurable period the 
 activities of the globe were directed to two objects only, 
 — the getting of food on the one hand, and to escape
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 17 
 
 being converted into food on the other. Life was the 
 stake, and to win was to use skillfully all the means pro- 
 vided and to fight to the bitter end. The will to sustain 
 the pain, fatigue, uncertainty, and frightful alternatives 
 must be supported by what we may call absolute physical 
 courage. Probably it was entirely indifferent to danger 
 because wholly unconscious of it. It shrank at no con- 
 sequence because it perceived none. Combat was a mere 
 commonplace, a function. Some mentality there must 
 have been from the start, but no suggestion of a moral 
 sense. To kill another for food was just as much a 
 matter of course as it is for the housewife to cook the 
 oatmeal for breakfast. Perhaps it should not be called 
 courage, as there is nothing in the nature of man exactly 
 corresponding to it. But it cannot be denied that it is 
 the raw material out of which physical courage in man 
 has been evolved. It adapted itself to existing condi- 
 tions, as it has in man. It is true, too, that in proportion 
 as courage in man has approached this pure and unquali- 
 fied animal daring, — the instinctive response to appetite, 
 — it has gained the greatest respect and applause. 
 
 Without attempting to follow the steps of its develop- 
 ment, let us come to a much later period, where we find it 
 divided broadly into two classes, — the carnivora and her- 
 bivora among mammals, — with a like distinction among 
 birds, insects, and other creatures. The flesh eaters 
 retain their ferocity almost in its primal vigor, but modi- 
 fied by experience and adapted to the changed conditions. 
 Almost their sole mission in life is to seize and devour 
 the vegetable eaters. The mechanism which fits them for 
 this at the same time provides them a formidable defense
 
 l8 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 against attack. They do not, therefore, prey on each 
 other, as a rule, — though they fight for other reasons, — 
 and in general beyond the family we do not find them 
 organized either for attack or defense. 
 
 The herbivora also subsist upon life, but in a form 
 which probably experiences no pain, and which cannot 
 escape, and offers no active resistance. The mechanism 
 which enables them to secure and masticate their food is 
 nearly useless for defense. They must, therefore, avoid 
 attack through the keenness of their senses, by conceal- 
 ment, by simulation, by swiftness of motion, and by 
 endurance. Some of them have developed somewhat for- 
 midable weapons, but in general inadequate for individual 
 defense against the carnivora. 
 
 It would be, perhaps, a misuse of language to say that 
 an animal shows its courage by running away and avoid- 
 ing a fatal combat. Let us observe, nevertheless, that it 
 has accomplished all that it could have done even by a 
 successful combat. It could not eat or in any way make 
 use of its antagonist. It is altogether a question of 
 adapting means to ends. It is the old problem in a dif- 
 ferent form. Strength, cutting and tearing teeth, beak, 
 claws, talons, compete with swift wing and foot, with con- 
 cealment, alertness, and position of advantage. For these 
 defenseless creatures to engage in voluntary combat with 
 their pursuers would show complete misconception as to 
 their powers or complete indifference to safety. It would 
 be to act without motive, there being no conceivable 
 object to be gained. It would result in the swift de- 
 struction not only of their species, but also of those who 
 prey upon them. From the biological point of view,
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 19 
 
 the action of the so-called timid creature is entitled 
 to just as much admiration as that of the flesh eater. 
 Both, doubtless, act upon instinct, developed by heredity 
 through countless generations, until it is almost auto- 
 matic and infallible. That the flesh eater is oftener the 
 winner means only that his class is perpetuated where 
 otherwise it would perish. It is simply in the order of 
 things. The one who escapes by avoiding conflict does 
 not show a higher intelligence than his adversary, but 
 he shows no less. Each uses such means as he has for 
 his own preservation, and neither probably has any pride 
 or emotion beyond bare content with the end achieved. 
 I do not suppose the deer brags because he has out- 
 run the wolf, nor the lion when he has carried off a cow. 
 It is a mere function. 
 
 Nevertheless, we find among these grass eaters a new 
 principle coming in, destined at a later stage to be 
 
 A lever to uplift the earth 
 And roll it in another course. 
 
 It is not quite the beginning of the principle of com- 
 bination, but it is the beginning of society as distin- 
 guished from the family. The power of organization and 
 associated effort is brought into the problem of life. In 
 some cases, as with the buffalo, this is fairly adequate 
 against all foes but man. Where no active resistance 
 can be put forth, the security is greatly increased by 
 having many individuals on the watch against a common 
 danger; and this was brought to a still higher degree of 
 efficiency by having certain animals posted as sentries 
 while the others fed or slept.
 
 20 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 Following this organization for purpose of defense, 
 probably, — though they may have been contemporane- 
 ous or even antecedent, — we find a few cases of combi- 
 nation for offensive purposes, as with the jackals, the 
 wolves, and the dogs. These are individually weak as 
 against some of the creatures on which they must depend 
 for food. Possibly this is necessary for protection against 
 still more powerful flesh eaters. There is no traceable 
 moral element and no regard for consecjuences. There 
 is no sympathy with the victim and no hatred. There 
 is ferocity and implacability ; but this is a part of the 
 game. It is a question of getting a meal with the small- 
 est cost in fatigue and pain. We do, indeed, see among 
 the cats a sort of sardonic humor, perhaps delight, in the 
 sufferings of their victims, manifesting itself as play. 
 
 Now, in the organization we have noticed in both these 
 classes, some sort of leadership is a necessity. The indi- 
 vidual that has shown the greatest capacity for offense or 
 defense becomes the leader. The qualification is deter- 
 mined by actual trial, in contest with his possible rivals. 
 If he is not glorified as a hero, it is because the feeling 
 of admiration is still undeveloped. At any rate, he gets 
 all he could possibly ask, and all that his community has 
 to bestow. In the contests which have settled his right 
 to the leadership he has displayed just as much courage 
 as the lion and tiger in theirs. 
 
 When man appeared on the earth, we may say with 
 confidence, he did not differ much from his near relatives. 
 He had the instinct of the herbivora for combination for 
 the purpose of defense, and of the wolf and jackal for 
 attack. He united the characteristics of both classes,
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 21 
 
 his food also coming from both. In the beginning he 
 was in the main a flesh eater, but in course of time his 
 food came more and more to consist of grains, vegetables, 
 and nuts. The procurement of food, at the outset, con- 
 stituted almost his sole employment. His contests with 
 the great carnivora were waged with a double purpose, 
 not only to avoid being eaten, but to add to his own food 
 supply. With his unaided physical powers, hands and 
 feet without claws, teeth unfitted for seizing and tearing, 
 he was a feeble creature as compared with the cave bear 
 and lion. Under these conditions his intelligence showed 
 him the utility of combination. Altruism had no part in 
 it, probably, this being no more than germinal in his 
 organization. There was scarcely a glimmer of moral 
 sense. There was no individual right of property, no 
 sympathy with suffering, no remorse for wrongdoing, 
 as there was no sense of right and wrong ; no idea of a 
 superior power approving or condemning an act, no fore- 
 sight, no dread of future retribution. His tools or weapons 
 were such things as he could grasp with his hands, — 
 stones or clubs. It was an absolute necessity that his 
 group act in concert. After a while he learned how to 
 fashion rude cutting and thrusting implements, knives, 
 hatchets, spears of wood charred and hardened or tipped 
 with bone or stone, and, later still, arrows. With his 
 power to grasp, wield, and hurl these primitive weapons, 
 his cunning and combined effort, he often overcame his 
 most formidable antagonist, as evidenced by the bones 
 remaining in the caves where he dwelt. There was great 
 courage as well as skill in the use of his limited equipment, 
 while in a great proportion of his contests he lost his life.
 
 22 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 Into the leadership of this primitive community — the 
 term "drove" would almost equally well designate it 
 — the best man, after proving his title to that distinc- 
 tion by contests with his fellows, was inducted. The 
 reward was the respect of the males and the admiration 
 of the females. Three factors enter into the fitness of 
 this man for leadership, — a high degree of physical per- 
 fection to insure the requisite strength, agility, and 
 endurance, a high degree of animal daring, and skill in 
 employing the resources at his command. These are all 
 directed to strictly utilitarian ends. There is not yet 
 any moral quality and, apart from their adaptation to 
 desirable ends, nothing to admire. His courage is not 
 different from that of any other animal, and because no 
 longer the only or even chief means of accomplishing his 
 ends, it must be less absolute than among the lower 
 animals. The usefulness of the physical organism which 
 fits him for the work he has to accomplish makes it to 
 our eyes the standard of physical beauty ; but whether it 
 would be so to a mind entirely outside and uninfluenced 
 by this consideration we cannot say. Every race, in fact, 
 adheres to its own standards, and the monstrosities of 
 the one are the adornments and ideals of another. The 
 hippopotamus, we must suppose, is as beautiful to his kind 
 as man to his. Except for his usefulness, there is no reason 
 to think the hero was agreeable, or that he was held in 
 any high esteem. On his part there is no generosity, no 
 devotion to the common good, except as this contributed 
 to his own safety or gratification. All in all, we must con- 
 clude that heroes were a disagreeable necessity and, by 
 our standards, gratuitously and abnormally offensive.
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 23 
 
 From the first we may suppose that men made some 
 small provision for their future wants, as even the dog 
 accumulates his heap of bones, the squirrel his store of 
 nuts, and bees and ants their treasures. Man went a 
 step farther. He discovered that certain animals could 
 be domesticated and so preserved for an indefinite time 
 for some future need, and that grains and vegetables 
 could be multiplied by cultivation. But when he had 
 thus begun these small accumulations one group of men 
 immediately became an object of envy to another. Man 
 has no more relish for persistent application than any 
 other animal. . Labor under all conditions is irksome, and 
 under those then prevailing must have been well-nigh 
 intolerable. Men preferred the stress and danger of 
 battle with the chance of wounds and death to pro- 
 tracted and inglorious toil. No right in property was yet 
 recognized. It was entirely legitimate for another group 
 of men to possess themselves of these stores if they could. 
 Those who had accumulated them might hold them if 
 they could. The group thus became the new unit, and 
 contests were between the latter rather than between 
 individuals, as in the earlier times. The strong appropri- 
 ated the weak, feeding upon them literally as well as 
 figuratively. 
 
 It is not necessary to my purpose to trace the indus- 
 trial history of man, or the development of what we call 
 moral ideas, one of the first of these being probably the 
 recognition of the right of property, individual and com- 
 munal. Somewhere in their progress men came to realize 
 that it cost less to produce what they needed than to 
 take it from their neighbors. They were, indeed, quite
 
 24 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 ready for the latter whenever a specially tempting oppor- 
 tunity presented itself ; but more and more they tended 
 to some systematic industry as a regular and sure depend- 
 ence. With the increase of experience and knowledge of 
 the resources of nature, production has called for a con- 
 stantly diminishing expenditure of fatigue and toil. The 
 communities, on the other hand, have grown larger, partly 
 through natural increase and partly through fusion of 
 the groups. Just as individuals found security against 
 a stronger individual by combination, so a small group 
 found it against a larger one by combining with a third. 
 At last we find great nations, occupying great territories 
 and developing their resources. War has become a much 
 more serious matter, and cannot be entered upon without 
 long preparation and at vast expense, so great that the 
 winner is still a loser. Meantime the idea of personal 
 and property rights has been growing, and the rights 
 themselves have been well defined. Following, but far 
 behind these, as we should expect, comes the recognition 
 of the rights of the communities among each other. 
 Treaties, compacts, alliances, understandings of various 
 kinds are entered into, — from selfish or prudential motives 
 in the beginning, it may be conceded, but these finally 
 become the basis of international law. Primarily this 
 was to the advantage of the weaker state, but it eventu- 
 ally became equally advantageous to the stronger, as it 
 furnished a standard of conduct and a basis for the set- 
 tlement of disputes more economical than war. Mean- 
 time the principle of altruism, which in some incipient 
 form existed far down in the scale of life, has been devel- 
 oping, until at last it is very active and far-reaching.
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 25 
 
 The weak and unfortunate are no longer eaten, but trans- 
 ferred to hospitals, asylums, and almshouses, and sup- 
 ported at the common expense. Wars are dreadfully 
 oppressive and burdensome financially, but are waged at 
 an ever-lessening destruction of life. They are not car- 
 ried on in the old spirit at all. The wounded are not 
 put to death, but treated by antiseptics and cared for as 
 tenderly as the circumstances will permit. Captives are 
 not reduced to servitude. Instead of wasting provinces, 
 destroying cities and sowing them with salt, private prop- 
 erty is protected, at least in theory, and the public prop- 
 erty preserved, especially the things which pertain to the 
 higher civilization, such as libraries, schooLs, museums, 
 hospitals, and art collections. Infants do not have their 
 heads dashed against walls, nor are they tossed in sport 
 from spear-point to spear-point, as in the old "strenuous " 
 days so beloved and mourned by some of our latter-day 
 statesmen. Women are not outraged. Shops are not 
 looted, but stand open, the merchants calmly dispens- 
 ing their wares to the victors at extravagant prices. 
 Consider the significance of a general, after a battle, 
 borrowing ambulances of his enemy, as was done in 
 the South African War. And now, at the end of nine- 
 teen centuries of Christianity, we have seen the most 
 remarkable proposition in the history of the race put 
 forth, not by some feeble nation, trembling before the 
 threat of annihilation by a stronger, but by the most 
 powerful ruler in the world, to form a tribunal in which 
 all international disputes and misunderstandings shall 
 be determined upon principles of right and equity, — in 
 brief, that the golden rule be recognized by nations as
 
 26 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 well as individuals. This proposition, thus put forth, we 
 have seen welcomed and favorably acted upon by the 
 nations. 
 
 Now, let us observe in outline the development of life 
 from its emergence to its highest manifestation. First, 
 the condition where each individual was in active antag- 
 onism to every other, and where the victor became the 
 sepulcher of the vanquished ; there was no composition 
 and no alternative. Second, an element of intelligence 
 which forecast the chances of success, — prudence or 
 cowardice, if we so choose to designate it, — taking the 
 direction of concealment, flight, or avoidance of the pres- 
 ence of the stronger, — cunning or strategy. Third, the 
 organization of the weaker creatures against a stronger, 
 for mutual defense. Fourth, organization for purposes 
 of more efficient or economical production, in which we 
 may include combinations like those of the wolves and 
 dogs to capture game too powerful or too fleet for 
 a single individual. Fifth, organization of the weaker 
 communities against a stronger. Sixth, the coalescence 
 of all communities into one large one for the regulation 
 of national conduct, these large communities commonly 
 determined as to their limits by some physical features, 
 as mountains, deserts, or bodies of water, separating them 
 more or less from other nations. Seventh, intercourse 
 and trade relations between nations, and a code of rules 
 recognizing and enforcing the rights of each. 
 
 Throughout this life history of the world physical 
 courage has survived, but at each step it has undergone 
 modification, and it has lost in importance. At a very 
 early stage cunning and skill were as indispensable as
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 2/ 
 
 mere daring. Neither of them in the beginning had any 
 distinctive moral quaHty. Even in the heroic age, as 
 sung by Homer, Ulysses received as much praise for 
 his "much planning" as for his strength and daring. 
 During that immensely long period, then, when the life 
 of the world was dependent upon what may be called the 
 natural supply and was unable to exploit the resources 
 of the world or to multiply or add to the existing prod- 
 ucts, an immense value was set upon physical courage 
 as a condition precedent to living at all. The conduct 
 of man as well as the actions of the lower animals was 
 determined by a rigorous necessity. But when it began 
 to dawn upon man that the resources of nature are prac- 
 tically unlimited, and all we have to do is to help our- 
 selves, other qualities became greatly more important 
 than courage. Observation, invention, sagacity, judg- 
 ment, self-control, patience, persistence became the all- 
 important factors. While the food question was still 
 very pressing, the supply came through the industry of 
 man instead of through the destruction of wild animals or 
 other men. Regular, if primitive industries, arose, and 
 rude com.merce in the form of barter was found easier and 
 more economical of pain and labor than the old distribu- 
 tion through combat and plunder. Foresight, caution, 
 shrewdness, and endurance superseded the furious spasms 
 of destructive courage which, as the great utility, had 
 been the one thing to call for admiration. The humani- 
 ties came into play. Literature, — at first as folklore, — 
 music, art, architecture, began to occupy the thoughts 
 of men. The superfluities of one age became the neces- 
 sities of the next, the one beginning where the other
 
 28 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 left off. But while the food supply will always be impor- 
 tant, since life cannot be long maintained upon an empty 
 stomach, the channels of supply are now so regular and 
 definite, the deficiencies of one region so easily supplied 
 by the surplus of another, the provision for the weak 
 and unfortunate so abundant, that the question is no 
 longer even perplexing, and physical courage in the form 
 of its earlier manifestation hardly enters into the prob- 
 lem at all. Wars are no longer undertaken through any 
 necessity, but through jealousies, misunderstandings, 
 differences in political and religious opinions and ideas 
 of honor. Last of all, we see nations going to war out 
 of a sentiment which they persuade themselves is sheer 
 humanity. Yet, strange to say, the sentiment which has 
 driven a nation to war shrinks from the consequences 
 entailed. Most of us will remember the hysterical shriek 
 that went up from one end of the country to the other 
 when Ensign Bagley and four other men were killed, the 
 first victims on our side of a war which we had so lightly 
 undertaken in the name of humanity. That it meant 
 killing men on the other side we knew, but these had no 
 right to live. It was a kind of Sunday-school work in 
 which we were engaged, in which God was, as a matter 
 of course, on our side. But the killing of our own men 
 — we had not dreamed of anything so horrible. How 
 are we to account for this feeling ? Simply that, along- 
 side of vast unreason, selfishness, and prejudice, the 
 altruistic spirit fairly dominates the world. If it does 
 not extend to all, it extends, at least, to those nearest 
 us and those to whom our attention is directed. It is 
 shown in thousands of ways in civil life, and notably
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 29 
 
 in the sympathy for those who have committed mon- 
 strous crimes. 
 
 In order to see how insignificant a factor this old form 
 of physical courage has become in modern life, we need 
 only to compare the condition of the United States with 
 the conditions existing in its territory at the time of the 
 discovery of America. Even then the native races had 
 traveled as far from the cave dwellers as we have from 
 them. The population, about all that could be main- 
 tained, did not reach five per cent of ours. There was 
 considerable industry and some commerce, but produc- 
 tion in proportion to the effort put forth was very small. 
 Nearly all the requisites of life, food, clothing, and 
 shelter, were derived from the chase. With us, fishing 
 excepted, this is too small to be reckoned. With the 
 Indian, every male, from a very early age, was a warrior. 
 With us, for a whole generation, one fourth of one per 
 cent of the males between eighteen and forty-five years 
 of age were sufficient for this function. The Indians 
 sometimes had a surfeit of food, followed by enforced 
 abstinence and great suffering. The poorest among us 
 enjoy a higher degree of average comfort than the abo- 
 rigines under the most favorable circumstances. There 
 is no reason to doubt that our population can be multi- 
 plied tenfold with a still higher average of comfort than 
 now. If we consider the richness and complexity of 
 modern life, its intellectual, religious, and social develop- 
 ment, we can hardly fail to see that the old destructive 
 courage is nearly eliminated except as a mischief-maker. 
 The old-fashioned strenuous life is chiefly a concern to 
 the police. Nine times out of ten an unusual display of
 
 30 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 physical courage lands the hero of it in jail. How, then, 
 is it that it continues to hold so high a place in the 
 popular estimate, so absurdly outweighing its real util- 
 ity, calling for admiration and applause a hundred times 
 its due ? If we consider attentively the phenomena of 
 life development, we shall observe three distinct stages : 
 first, the stage of simple brute courage ; second, that in 
 which mind, chiefly as cunning, formed a large element, 
 finally outweighing entirely the brute courage ; third, 
 that in which a moral sentiment has been a factor, 
 finally becoming the one of chief importance. They 
 were the age of individual antagonism, of communal 
 antagonism, and of combination. No hard-and-fast line 
 divides them, but they shade into each other. Each has 
 been a great utility in turn. With the dawn of intelli- 
 gence, physical courage did not disappear nor become 
 unnecessary, but it was modified to suit other methods 
 and aims. With the growth of the moral sentiment the 
 mental element was not diminished in importance, but it 
 took a new direction. For the development of modern 
 life, that confidence which is the basis of all associated 
 effort and which is possible only under well-defined 
 moral ideas is an absolute necessity. But in each stage 
 the attitude and habit established in the preceding lingers 
 long after its use has disappeared and it has become an 
 obstacle to further progress. In every age and in every 
 man there remains an inheritance of the past, — in habits, 
 customs, language, opinions, beliefs, a vast residuum of 
 the outworn and inept. In each stage of development 
 life has adapted itself to its circumstances as well as it 
 could. These three characteristics are to be considered
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 31 
 
 as agencies, pure and simple, in the process of adapta- 
 tion. Physical courage is immensely older than cunning 
 or strategy, and is more firmly established. Mentality 
 is older than the moral sentiment, which is the least 
 stable of all, though it is the indispensable factor in 
 social life. 
 
 Now, the hero worship of which I speak is admiration 
 for physical courage exerted skillfully, that is cunningly, 
 for the purpose of overcoming an opposing physical 
 force. Admiration is a quality which has perhaps under- 
 gone just as much transformation as courage itself, but 
 in some crude form we must suppose that it was awak- 
 ened in the beginnings of life at the display of animal 
 daring, the one supreme necessity to existence. Admi- 
 ration for skill, strategy, and cunning was awakened when 
 these, too, were a necessary supplement to physical cour- 
 age. Now, if we will observe primitive races, we shall 
 find an immense degree of admiration attached to cun- 
 ning in its lower forms. To accomplish an end by lying 
 or stealing is not merely permissible, but calls for vastly 
 more admiration than to accomplish the same end by 
 what we should call legitimate methods. With ourselves 
 it is still held that all things are fair in war and almost 
 everything in politics. Even those whom we regard as 
 enlightened statesmen do not hesitate, where an advan- 
 tage is to be gained, wholly to misrepresent the position 
 of an opponent. 
 
 These lingering characteristics and habits of a lower 
 phase of life we call survivals. They are not peculiar to 
 man, but exist in all life. We need only to go to our 
 flocks and herds to find them in full vigor, where it is
 
 32 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 very clear that they are no longer useful, but the con- 
 trary. These creatures under domestication are provided 
 for, selfishly of course, by man, and secured from nearly 
 all dangers to which they were exposed in their wild 
 state, except danger from man himself, against which the 
 surviving habits or characteristics are of no avail. 
 
 Observe, now, the admiration which the hens in a 
 barnyard pay to the ruling lord. If the young cocks do 
 not love him, they treat him with due deference and 
 simulate a profound respect for his authority. But by 
 and by a stranger appears, or a young cock growing up 
 comes to recognize his own strength and "heroic soul." 
 A fight ensues, and the leader is vanquished. It is a 
 battle royal, stubborn and protracted. So far as their 
 means extend, the combatants are as ferocious as birds 
 of prey. They do not yield at a few scratches, nor flinch 
 from frightful wounds. Torn, bedraggled, bleeding, the 
 sometime master hurls himself, a fiery billet, upon his 
 foe, striking with beak and claw until utter physical 
 exhaustion paralyzes any further effort, when he slinks 
 away, overwhelmed with mortification, to die, perhaps, 
 in a corner. Do his devoted admirers go to him to 
 soothe his griefs or comfort him in his pain .'' Not at 
 all. They do not wait for him to get out of sight before 
 transferring their allegiance to the new lord paramount. 
 Perhaps they feel no contempt for the deposed ruler. It 
 is all a mere matter of course. 
 
 Now, if we account for hero worship among our do- 
 mestic animals as a survival long after the hero himself 
 has ceased to subserve any useful end, how shall we 
 account for similar phenomena among ourselves .'' How
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 33 
 
 do we explain the sudden dethroning of a popular idol 
 who commits an act of questionable taste ? Has it come 
 to the point with us that good taste is more desirable 
 than heroism ? 
 
 So far I have dwelt upon that form of physical courage 
 which enters into the definition of heroism, that is, the 
 courage which incites to combat, offensive or defensive, 
 with one's fellows. There is a form of courage much 
 harder to maintain because unattended by excitement 
 and unstimulated by applause. Many of the occupations 
 of modern life are extremely dangerous, and but for 
 coolness and caution, qualities which have nothing to do 
 with courage, they would be far more dangerous than 
 they are now. We do not think of a man as a hero be- 
 cause he is engaged in driving a wagon loaded with nitro- 
 glycerin, or in shooting oil wells, or working in a powder 
 mill. To the spectator a man on the top of a ten- or 
 twenty-story steel framework seems to be in imminent 
 danger, but with the workman it is entirely a matter of 
 experience and training. He knows perfectly the dan- 
 ger of any forgetf ulness or want of caution ; but he does 
 not mean to forget. Because of his caution the chance of 
 falling from a twenty-story building is much less than 
 from a ten-foot scaffold ; but the consequences of the lat- 
 ter might be less serious. So in the manipulation of any 
 of the giant forces of the universe, but for his vigilance 
 and prudence man would be crushed as a moth. In all 
 the occupations classed as hazardous and extra-hazardous, 
 while courage is necessary, the old impulsive, uncalculat- 
 ing, combative sort not only has no place but would con- 
 stitute a chief danger. Even in war it now plays a very
 
 34 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 subordinate part. The battle belongs not to the brave but 
 to the skillful employment of the tremendous enginery of 
 modern warfare. No one can doubt that the Spaniards in 
 our late war were as brave as our own men. 
 
 There are a few cases where we accord a meas- 
 ure of applause to courageous deeds in civil life, but 
 never with quite the zeal and enthusiasm with which 
 we accord it to the military hero. For a Jim Bludsoe, 
 who holds the nose of a boat against the bank until the 
 passengers escape, himself going down in the blazing 
 ruin, we can spare a little admiration, as also to the 
 fireman who with scaling ladder climbs the lofty wall to 
 save a life. It is a languid approval in comparison with 
 the enthusiastic applause we should lavish upon an action 
 calling for lesser fortitude, made in conflict with the 
 intent to take life. Such as it is, it is a late develop- 
 ment, growing out of the altruistic spirit, and in the old 
 strenuous days would have been looked upon as evidence 
 of weakness or a disordered mind. 
 
 But while in the popular mind the old hero worship 
 holds its place with wonderful persistence, there are 
 many things to indicate that it is growing confused and 
 no longer infallibly follows the old ideals. The stoker 
 in the hold of a battleship runs as much risk as the 
 admiral on the deck, and his services are an indispensable 
 factor in the result achieved. The men in the ranks run 
 vastly greater risks than the general in the rear, who 
 plans the whole movement of battle. It is not an essen- 
 tial, therefore, that the hero exhibit great personal daring 
 or prowess; so that even now a higher value is set upon 
 intelligence than upon mere physical courage. It ought
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 35 
 
 to be an easy step to the appreciation of that intelligence 
 which is directed to altogether useful and beneficent ends, 
 such as its relative importance demands. 
 
 From what has been said it ought to be clear that 
 heroism as embodied in the traditional sense and popular 
 ideal is already archaic. The unreasoning, instinctive, 
 brute courage, ready to fight without cause and without 
 caution, is no longer a useful quality. Even in war it has 
 lost its value. What is wanted now is coolness, endur- 
 ance, patience, steadiness. There is little field for the 
 old spectacular fighting of man against man. Skill in 
 the use of weapons of precision at long range, concerted 
 movements, knowledge of the topography of a country, 
 quickness in seizing the points of advantage, the adop- 
 tion of the best means of concealment, not only of 
 intended movements but of the individual combatants, 
 the taking advantage of cover, all these things fall within 
 what we have noted as the second development of life, 
 prudence, mentality, and cunning, — a form of what men 
 once called cowardice. The South African War served 
 to demonstrate the futility of courage alone. To rush 
 men across a fire-swept zone against a protected enemy 
 is now seen to be mere madness and self-destroying folly. 
 
 Finally, we shall make a great mistake if we allow our- 
 selves to undervalue physical courage. It will always be 
 a necessity in the life of man. Situations will always 
 arise where men must face danger, taking their lives, as 
 it were, in their hands ; but the application of courage 
 in the old methods and to the old ends is becoming year 
 by year obsolete. Reason is taking the place of a blind 
 appetency, and science is superseding brute force. The
 
 36 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 best man now is not the strongest, nor even the one 
 most skillful in wielding destructive weapons. What we 
 call moral courage has become a great factor even in 
 war ; but its uses in peace are a thousandfold more 
 important. 
 
 There are those who sigh over the changed conditions 
 and insist that the old rugged strength and stout heart 
 were better than the intelligent but relatively weak man 
 of our day. They gibe at the complexity and refinements 
 of modern life as needless burdens and insist that condi- 
 tions are not on the whole improved. It is not necessary 
 to argue the point. Many insist that life is not worth 
 the living in any case. The troglodyte, mumbling over 
 the raw bones of the aurochs, never stopped to discuss 
 this matter ; and no pessimist would argue the desira- 
 bility of going back to cave dwelling. Perhaps life never 
 was worth living; but it certainly was the less so the 
 farther we go back in the story of the human race. Some 
 centuries hence it may be worth a great deal more than 
 now. There may be a fourth stage of development, upon 
 which we have already made a small advance. Reason, 
 in a larger sense, a truer and wider perception of the 
 relations of things, a better understanding of the utilities 
 and capacities of nature, will take possession of man, and 
 will receive that admiration which has in turn been 
 bestowed upon physical courage, cunning, and moral 
 virtues. The coming man will be brave, but his bravery 
 will be directed to wholly different objects and aims. 
 He will bear pain better than now. He will be calm in 
 the presence of danger, and accept death, when it comes, 
 without fear or repining, as a part of the order of nature,
 
 THE ETHICS OF HEROISM 37 
 
 a part of his environment against which it would be idle 
 to contend, and as subserving higher uses in the process 
 of the development of the race, through the removal 
 of that which has fulfilled its mission and has become 
 obsolete.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 
 
 Men differ upon almost every conceivable subject. 
 They are vehement in their contention, on the one hand, 
 that this political party or that is actuated by high and 
 holy motives, and, on the other, that it is bent upon the 
 ruin and degradation of the country. Theological dis- 
 putes are acrimonious in the extreme; and men wax 
 valiant in fight over questions of grammar. There are 
 men, though not many to avow it, who doubt the pro- 
 priety and binding force of each one of the ten com- 
 mandments. But throughout all our borders probably 
 we should find hardly a man who would hesitate an 
 instant to say that patriotism is a duty. If asked 
 " What is patriotism ? " the very babes and sucklings 
 would answer, "It is the love of country." Those who 
 are a little past the suckling period would doubtless 
 add, "and devotion to its interests." I make no objec- 
 tion to the definition and do not know that I can give a 
 better ; but I desire to say that it is a pure abstraction. 
 When we translate it into terms of action or feeling under 
 concrete conditions, plenty of difficulties will arise. In 
 what sense is it a duty to love one's country ? 
 
 It is the land of my birth, where I have always lived. 
 My friends, my interests, my associations are all here. 
 If I should go alone to a foreign land, for a short time, 
 
 38
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 39 
 
 whatever the desire or inducement, I should very Hkely 
 be lonely and homesick. Every immigrant has doubtless 
 had that feeling upon setting foot upon our shores, 
 strongly as he might believe that his expatriation was to 
 his advantage. Is this feeling patriotism ? If so, is it 
 American patriotism .'' 
 
 There may be other reasons for loving my country. 
 It is a good place for the manufacture of steel rails, 
 or tin plate, or buttons, or twine ; and the government, 
 grateful to me for building up a new industry, by its 
 legislation raises the price of these products for my ben- 
 efit. Conditions are favorable for carrying on a big wheat 
 farm or a department store. I am an officer in the army 
 or navy, an employe in the civil service, well supported 
 at the public expense. There is freedom of speech, and 
 I may abuse my neighbor as much as I like, if he is not 
 a bigger man than I, or my language does not trench 
 upon what is actionable at law. There is religious lib- 
 erty, and I can go to any church, or stay away, as I 
 like, and am exempt from tithes. These are excellent 
 reasons for loving my country; but do they make me 
 a patriot .-* 
 
 The last half of the definition will, upon examination, 
 be found equally hazy and ambiguous. What, for exam- 
 ple, does "devotion to its interests" require of me in 
 a war like the late conflict in the Philippines .-* To pay my 
 taxes, of course, and put stamps on my bank checks ; even 
 the publicans and sinners must do that. But what must 
 I say, and how must I feel ? Must I believe that it is a 
 glorious war, born of the loftiest and most disinterested 
 motives .■' Must I hold that wherever our flag has once
 
 40 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 been raised it must remain ? Do the interests of my 
 country mean only or chiefly its material advantages ? If 
 so, must I limit myself to the immediate results, or shall 
 I consider those which may be looked for in the future ? 
 Is the traditional love of freedom and justice to be taken 
 into the account ? What weight shall I allow to political 
 ideals, to historic precedent, to the effect of war upon 
 the public morals ? What to the sudden blazing up of a 
 military spirit, a recrudescence of the barbaric instincts, 
 the increase, likely long to continue, of army and navy, 
 with their burden of taxation ? What to the growing 
 disposition to interfere in the affairs of other nations ? 
 
 I am not here discussing any of these questions in 
 themselves, but merely showing that before the "best 
 interests of our country " can be determined all these 
 must receive their proper answer. The proposition which 
 we had thought so self-evident is more complex than we 
 supposed. 
 
 But quite oblivious to any of these limitations, the 
 popular conception of patriotism, concretely stated, is 
 simplicity itself. It is that it requires us, off and on, to 
 hate all foreign governments, especially such as are called 
 monarchies, and to pursue our own interests and ends 
 with lordly indifference to the opinions and interests of 
 mankind. It glories in the immensity of our population, 
 our vast resources, and our assumed ability to thrash 
 the united world. It relates, in fact, wholly to war, 
 actual or prospective. It means admiration for the prow- 
 ess of our arms, our ability to devastate and destroy;^ 
 
 ^ One of our teachers told me that she asked one of her scholars 
 what patriotism meant, and received the prompt information, " To kill
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 41 
 
 and while it may plume itself upon the magnitude of our 
 industries and arts, it does not recognize the latter feel- 
 ing as patriotism. Of the higher life of the nation, the 
 connection of its thought with the thought of the world, 
 its civilization as a part of the advance of the race, it 
 takes no heed at all. If this is the view of the unthinking 
 only, then it must be said that there are a vast number 
 of people commonly rated as intelligent who do not think. 
 It is the view of many of the really kind-hearted and con- 
 scientious, who would not for the world wrong a neighbor. 
 It is the view of a great multitude who are influenced by 
 commercial motives entirely, and who see in a state of 
 war chances to improve their fortunes. To point out these 
 would be an ungrateful and a useless task — but we all 
 know some of them. 
 
 There is still another class who in a general way are 
 opposed to war, who say in effect : " The nation can do 
 no wrong." Being at war, no matter what it involves or 
 how brought about, whether avoidable or not, whether 
 its successful prosecution will or will not bring either 
 honor or advantage, it is the part of patriotism to sup- 
 press their opinions, to wash their hands of any responsi- 
 bility in the matter, to encourage the war spirit, and 
 
 Spaniards." Now that the teaching of patriotism is to be made compul- 
 sory in our schools, one may well tremble for the future of his country. 
 That any ideas can be inculcated other than those current in our news- 
 papers and, I am obliged to say, in the ordinary pulpit, is hardly to be 
 hoped for. If there is anything of which we stand in crying need, it is an 
 antidote to this. How the subject is to be taught properly and usefully 
 is a matter for our best educators seriously to consider. The teacher 
 with rational ideas on the subject and courage to utter them would in 
 most of our communities suffer martyrdom.
 
 42 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 shout with the crowd. For all practical purposes they 
 might as well hold the popular view. Now, I concede 
 that the good citizen cannot, under any easily imaginable 
 circumstances, actively oppose his government, however 
 he may believe it to be in the wrong. He cannot refuse 
 his share of the burdens which war brings upon the 
 nation, nor can he give aid and comfort to the enemy. 
 But he is not under obligation to stultify himself or to 
 conceal his convictions. It is precisely at such times as 
 we are considering that temperate but earnest expression 
 of opinion may aid in bringing about a healthier public 
 sentiment. Those who really love their country ought to 
 be willing to be placed with the minority, to bear obloquy 
 and persecution, if necessary, in following what they 
 believe to be for its best interests. To acquiesce in an 
 unrighteous war, approving it in appearance and in word, 
 with a mental reservation and a promise when it is over 
 to do what they can to discourage future wars, is cow- 
 ardice or imbecility. 
 
 If patriotism is a duty, — and under my conception of 
 it I hold it to be so, — it must somehow be brought 
 within the system of ethics. Its basis must not be 
 sought in a sentiment, but in laws of right and wrong. 
 It is not an isolated virtue, but a part of character. It 
 is not a theory, but a question of conduct. " Love of 
 country " cannot be satisfied by a froth of enthusiasm, 
 the clapping of hands, the blubbering of vulgar senti- 
 mentality, nor even by enlistment in the army. " Devo- 
 tion to its interests " will not be evidenced by the blind 
 applause of every proposed action by the government, 
 right or wrong, wise or foolish. It will be shown rather
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 43 
 
 by the patient effort to determine, first of all, what is 
 the rational and proper action. If, unfortunately, a dif- 
 ferent one has been determined upon, it will endeavor, 
 so far as possible, to make the error manifest and to 
 urge another course. When the true one has been 
 found, then it will be manifest by a willingness to make 
 sacrifices and bear hardships, if need be, to accomplish 
 the end sought. It will therefore involve the exercise 
 of the soundest judgment and the coolest reason. 
 
 If this is the true conception of patriotism, then I am 
 sure no one can have for it greater veneration than I. 
 If I cannot approve everything which my country has done 
 or attempted, I do profoundly honor the ideals which 
 it set before itself in the beginning, and am distressed 
 beyond measure whenever it seems in danger of losing 
 them. I do not censure warmth of feeling, a glow of 
 pride, over the achievements of our countrymen as such. 
 Nay, there have been many occasions in my life when a 
 glimpse of the Stars and Stripes has wrought in me an 
 intense, sometimes, I must confess, a most irrational 
 enthusiasm. The flag is a symbol of the government; 
 but it is perfectly possible for it to stand for dishonor 
 and wrong. Few now doubt that it did so when it stood 
 for human slavery in our own land. Whatever it meant to 
 me in the more emotional season of youth, it is now " Old 
 Glory " only as it stands for glorious principles. If I am 
 a good citizen, I cannot, in my relations to my fellow 
 citizens, violate those principles of honor and morality 
 upon which the good of the community depends. No 
 more can a nation, without loss of character, without 
 dishonor, without forfeiting its right to the esteem of
 
 44 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 the world, violate the immutable laws of justice and 
 righteousness upon which the welfare of the community 
 of nations is based. 
 
 To say, therefore, as our newspapers have lately been 
 saying, ad nauseam, that we are a young giant just 
 becoming conscious of our strength, a great world power 
 that will not brook dictation, is quite beside the question. 
 It is precisely as if we should say that a young athlete is 
 justifiable in using his strength against any one on the 
 street who offends him or who chances to be in his way. 
 To say that we will not heed the intelligence or moral 
 sense of the world is to proclaim ourselves barbarians. 
 Concede, if you please, that we have nothing to fear, 
 that we are able to repel any force which may be 
 brought against us, the question whether the best inter- 
 ests of the nation will be subserved by possible conflicts 
 remains. Taking it in its lowest phase, will our industry 
 and trade be best promoted by war or peace .'' Will it be a 
 source of unqualified satisfaction to us, after the expend- 
 iture of enormous blood and treasure, to know that we 
 have inflicted equal or greater loss ? On the most selfish 
 view, as well as on the most disinterested, our true 
 course must be dictated by judgment and right reason. 
 How is it possible that the great majority even of intel- 
 ligent people have made patriotism practically synony- 
 mous with mere combativeness, one of the lower animal 
 instincts } If we attentively observe the conditions 
 under which this was developed, the purpose it has sub- 
 served in the advance of the race, the changes it has 
 undergone, how it has adapted itself to circumstances, 
 the matter will be simplified.
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 45 
 
 We have seen that in the lowest forms of life each 
 individual organism was unassociated with every other. 
 They were not entirely unrelated, since they had a com- 
 mon habitat and one life reacted upon another ; but 
 there was nothing in common. There was no sex. Life 
 was multiplied by the mere division of an organism, 
 each half becoming an individual life. There were no 
 organs, no special appliances, no senses, a rudimentary 
 sense of touch possibly excepted. The creature floated 
 about in the water without apparent aim, but upon 
 coming into contact with an object which could be 
 assimilated, in some way, without mouth or digestive 
 cavity, managed to envelope it with its own entire organ- 
 ism, which was a mere globule of jelly-like matter. The 
 whole creature might be considered a rudimentary 
 stomach, without and within. Thus the sundered halves 
 might conceivably furnish food for each other. Not 
 merely might the father eat the son, or the son the 
 father, but the creature might devour itself. Life was, 
 in brief, an organized appetite. For an immense period 
 the only question in the world was of eating or being 
 eaten, a hundred to one the latter, since one organism 
 could be perfected only by the destruction of many 
 others. The only relation which could subsist between 
 the different individuals in this microscopic world was 
 one of absolute antagonism ; and courage or indifference 
 to danger was the first condition of a prolonged existence. 
 Possibly the suffering was not great. There may have 
 been no consciousness of life, as we understand conscious- 
 ness, and there was almost certainly no dread of death. ^ 
 
 1 Haeckel thinks that consciousness proper is developed only in con- 
 nection with the nervous system, having a common center ; but this
 
 46 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 As the history of life went on, special organs were 
 developed, and contrivances by which the creature 
 became more efficient both in the art of destruction and 
 defense. Teeth, claws, horns, stings, fangs, increase of 
 strength, speed, agility, greater skill in the use of its 
 means, cunning in concealment or attack were devel- 
 oped ; but evermore the contest as to which should be 
 eaten went on. 
 
 Almost from the beginning, therefore, we find two 
 great classes or divisions of animal life, — one subsisting 
 on vegetable, and the other on animal life. We may 
 guess that combination first arose among the former for 
 the purpose of defense. Thus common resistance to 
 attack or communal vigilance and cunning took the place 
 of the exclusive, individual effort. This led, in some 
 cases, as with the dog, the wolf, and the jackal, to com- 
 bination for the purpose of destruction. In man combi- 
 nation for both purposes was probably effected from the 
 beginning. Something of the kind existed, indeed, much 
 lower down the scale of life, as with bees and ants, 
 where we find highly organized communities, perhaps 
 we might say civilization. I am not attempting to follow 
 
 appears to contradict his whole general theory of the progress of life. 
 Wherever we see any effort at the adaptation of an organism to its 
 environment, any attempt at self-preservation, we should postulate 
 some sort of consciousness. In the lowest forms of life it is, no doubt, 
 as vague as the life itself; but we do not have to go very high in the 
 scale of life to find a vigorous manifestation of it. Every boy has 
 noticed the energetic response of the earthworm to the stimulus of 
 the point of a fishhook and the writhings of the creature when he has 
 been successfully impaled. If not conscious suffering, what is it ? 
 Perhaps in these lower forms sensation and consciousness are the same 
 thing.
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 47 
 
 the exact order of the development of species, but merely 
 attempting to point out the general course of things. 
 
 With man, the family, consisting of a man, wife, or 
 wives, and children, formed the primary group, which 
 soon enlarged into the patriarchal family, then into 
 larger communities, the clan, tribe, and race. In every 
 stage a leader was a necessity ; and we have seen how 
 he was selected. All members of the group would be in 
 some sense dedicated to the common interest, whether 
 in offense or defense. But just as there were antago- 
 nisms between the individuals, there will now be between 
 the groups, the accumulations of each becoming objects 
 of desire to the other. In the contests that followed, 
 the successful leader became the hero. This was in no 
 way different, presumably, from the heroism shown by 
 animal leaders, but was higher in intelligence. In the 
 benefits of a successful contest each member of the 
 community shared, and there would be a community of 
 satisfaction. Each would have a vicarious pride in the 
 common achievement, whether he had contributed much 
 or little to it. Every male might legitimately aspire to 
 the leadership, so that there would be a community of 
 ambition. 
 
 Having now a developed communal feeling, we have 
 to go but a step to find the beginnings of patriotism. 
 At the outset the feeling of attachment to locality would 
 be weak or entirely wanting. Men would go where they 
 were most successful in securing fish and game, or where 
 roots and berries, on which they depended in part, were 
 most abundant. They would change their locality with- 
 out the slightest hesitation or regret whenever a better
 
 48 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 was found. But if the locality continued to furnish suffi- 
 cient food, they would gradually accumulate tools and 
 shelter, however rude, and the idea of ownership, com- 
 munal so far as the land is concerned, would arise. 
 
 Now, the family, consisting of father, mother, and 
 children ; the patriarchal family, consisting of several 
 primary families ; the tribe, composed of several patri- 
 archal families, recognizing each other as near kindred ; 
 the race, where the idea of kinship has mainly disap- 
 peared, but where a common origin is predicated, and 
 where common traditions largely control the develop- 
 ment, — all these may be called natural groups, growing 
 out of or taking form in the law of descent. But as far 
 back as we can go in history we find also the petty state, 
 cutting across tribal and race lines, including more and 
 less. We find also the nation, including several small 
 states or kingdoms. These are quite artificial and based 
 on considerations of utility or convenience only. The 
 influence of leadership has no doubt had something to do 
 with it, but it is quite safe to say that they could never 
 have been formed if they had not proved to be useful. 
 Just as the smaller groups were formed to eliminate indi- 
 vidual antagonisms, so these larger bodies were formed 
 to mitigate group antagonisms. 
 
 In the course of time the difficulties of changing the 
 habitat became great or prohibitive. The inconvenience 
 of transporting their personal belongings would forbid a 
 general migration. If this were overcome, it would still 
 be necessary to exterminate a similar population in the 
 territory to which removal was proposed. But after a 
 region is fairly settled and the cultivation of the soil
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 49 
 
 has come to be somewhat general, the work of one 
 year would have some relation to the future and value 
 beyond the immediate return. As civilization advances, 
 therefore, people become not figuratively but literally 
 attached to the soil. The interests of a people would be 
 all connected with a certain region, which they called 
 their country. Individuals move here and there, and 
 leave a country altogether, but the body of the people is 
 fixed. The borders of a state change through wars or 
 purchase, but the population remains. The fortunes of 
 the individual finally come to be dependent on the per- 
 petuity and stability of the community, and he begins to 
 have a sort of proprietary right in it. Whatever affects 
 the whole affects him. He gives himself credit for the 
 achievements of his neighbor, and finds comfort in shift- 
 ing the responsibility for his own failures upon the com- 
 munity at large. All this time he may have no love for 
 the land as such, and no love for the community of 
 which he is a part, but a mere perception of the advan- 
 tage which they afford him. A foreign land may appeal 
 to his aesthetic sense more strongly ; a foreign community 
 may offer greater advantages to his business interests, 
 his social instincts, his tastes. If he changes his habitat, 
 m a short time the same sentiment attaches to the new 
 community. To give up friends and break with lifelong 
 associations is a loss for a season, but he follows the 
 course which seems to him on the whole to offer the 
 greatest advantage. 
 
 Patriotism, then, in its origin and development, has 
 been utilitarian and economic rather than moral. It is 
 simply the principle of combination and cooperation
 
 50 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 applied to the aggregate interests of a community, small 
 or large. In the end, of course, it embraces more than 
 merely material ends, the moral and intellectual interests 
 coming in for their dues. While by our definition we 
 make it relate to a country, it is not, perhaps, to be dis- 
 tinguished from the sentiment which attaches to the 
 primitive home, the rude platform in the branches of a 
 tree, or the cave which furnished shelter and protection. 
 There cooperation in the work necessary to support life, 
 common use and ownership of the bits of shell, bone, or 
 stone, — their first household implements, — union for de- 
 fense, enjoyment in common of the fruits of their efforts, 
 finally resulted in the family feeling as we know it. The 
 sentiment attached itself, in turn, to each larger group, 
 retaining as much as it could of what it had, but giving 
 up something to each. Naturally the family tie is strong- 
 est of all because the earliest and having had the longest 
 inheritance. Next would follow the attachment to home, 
 the dwelling place and spot of ground owned or controlled 
 by the householder. Then would come the tie to the 
 neighborhood, including everything well known, but grow- 
 ing weaker with every step taken from the hearthstone. 
 In England we should find it following an order some- 
 thing like this : the family, the village or tun, the hun- 
 dred, the parish, the county, the petty state, the kingdom, 
 the empire. Our political divisions are more artificial and 
 pre-arranged. The order would run like this: the family, 
 the school district, the township, the city, the county, 
 the state, the United States. Chronologically or historic- 
 ally, we should find the tie first attaching to a little 
 island in the James River or a strip of rocky soil on the
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 5 1 
 
 Massachusetts coast. Now, it must spread itself over half 
 a continent. It does not need to be pointed out that it 
 must be weakened by this great extension, for the reason 
 that to the great mass of people the greater portion of 
 our country must remain absolutely unknown, and it is 
 impossible to have the same interest in that which is 
 remote as in that near at hand. At the time of our 
 separation from the mother country, the little planta- 
 tions had grown into thirteen colonies. Now we have 
 four times as many political groups. When we get 
 through our conquests we may have a hundred. At the 
 beginning of the Revolutionary War it never entered the 
 heads of the colonists, for the most part, that patriotism 
 required the people of one colony to love those of another, 
 or to devote themselves to its interests. Self-interest 
 alone suggested a union for common defense. Even up 
 to the time of the Civil War the idea that people in the 
 several states owed love or devotion to the interests of 
 the United States had been but feebly developed at the 
 South. Certain prescribed duties and burdens they rec- 
 ognized, but allegiance was due to the state. 
 
 Consider, now, another significant fact. The popula- 
 tion of our country is made up of nearly all the races of 
 the world, immigrants from all civilized nations, some 
 half-civilized and many barbarous peoples, with their 
 descendants. These all owed the duty of patriotism to 
 the communities from which they came. There were the 
 Indians, the original proprietors, hundreds of tribes, 
 owing fealty to a little community and a limited terri- 
 tory. In Louisiana there was a Spanish patriotism to 
 be changed into French and then into American. In
 
 52 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 California it was Spanish, then Mexican, then American. 
 In Alaska it was first Russian. Among the original 
 colonies many nationalities were Americanized. There 
 is said to be a little piece of land lying between Maine, 
 New Hampshire, and Canada not included in any jur- 
 isdiction. Presumably there is a de facto government, 
 and the poor people manage to get along some way 
 with the patriotism which attaches to this No-man's 
 land. But consider how sad it would be if, indulging the 
 belief that they were really within the jurisdiction of 
 Maine, they should allow their patriotic fervor to fix 
 itself to that cold-water state, and a future survey or 
 agreement should make it necessary to transfer it to the 
 state of abounding rock and easy license ; sadder yet, 
 should they finally be set off to Canada, so to become a 
 part of one of the effete monarchies of Europe ! It 
 would then be necessary for the people to learn "to love 
 what now they hate, and hate what they adore." This 
 is no empty speculation. Actual war once raged along 
 the border line between New York and Vermont because 
 the people did not know to which of these states their 
 patriotism belonged. 
 
 Perhaps the most peculiar spectacle is presented by 
 the attitude of our citizens of African descent, — dragged 
 from a distant land to which their patriotism was due, 
 held to unwilling service and unrequited toil, denied all 
 political and nearly all legal rights, property, wife, chil- 
 dren, home, bought and sold like cattle, subject to the 
 will or caprice of a master, their very claim to humanity 
 repudiated, so that the pride of ownership, which among 
 others finally develops into the patriotic sentiment, was.
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 53 
 
 as it were, reversed and made to cherish a negation. It 
 was the master's possession which they gloried in, and 
 their pride increased in proportion to the number of 
 people, themselves included, who had no rights at all. 
 Beyond one or two of the neighboring plantations, the 
 slave knew nothing whatever of his country, and his 
 ideas of its glory were but a distorted reflection of those 
 of his master, which may or may not have had a rational 
 basis. His devotion to the interests of his country, 
 measured by willingness to make sacrifices for it, would 
 probably have been small ; but in patriotism of the emo- 
 tional sort, that sentimental haze and blind enthusiasm 
 which works itself off in shouting, firing of guns, and 
 grandiloquent oratory, he has had no equal. 
 
 From these illustrations it must be clear that patriot- 
 ism, whatever it is, is not one of the absolute virtues, 
 like truthfulness, honesty, or sobriety, but the most 
 changeable, artificial, and relative which can well be 
 imagined. It shifts with every action of a community, 
 real or proposed. If that action is in accord with sound 
 reason, if it is the best possible under the conditions, 
 then the support and approval of the citizen is patriotic. 
 If it is against sound reason, to the disadvantage of the 
 country, or less advantageous than another course which 
 is open, patriotism will require the citizen to disapprove 
 and actively oppose it, even if it is necessary to stand 
 alone or to make a majority only by counting God 
 on his side. If the case is such that reason cannot 
 authoritatively determine what the best interests of the 
 country require, then citizens will take the one view or 
 the other according to their conception of the probable
 
 54 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 results, and their action will be equally patriotic, though 
 opposed. Thus it would seem that, in a concrete case, 
 the most important element in patriotism, devotion to 
 the interests of one's country, would eliminate blind sen- 
 timent entirely and become identical with reason. 
 
 We have already seen how courage, in its inception a 
 quality employed in combat, has steadily declined with 
 the development of mentality, so that now it holds only 
 a subordinate place even in war ; that with the growth 
 of the race it became even more widely applicable in the 
 arts of peace. In the end it is left with very little of its 
 primary character, and has been transmuted into cool- 
 ness, prudence, restraint, and reason. In like manner 
 patriotism found its first application in combat. War, if 
 not the normal state, was the chronic condition among 
 primitive races. The arts of peace, though from the first 
 they must have been immensely more important than 
 war, which produces absolutely nothing and is waged 
 solely for the purpose of destruction, attracted little 
 attention. At any rate, during this stage patriotism 
 meant simply the desire for the success of the commu- 
 nity in war. Love of country was joy in the success of 
 its arms. But in process of time it became apparent 
 to mankind that the real prosperity of a country 
 depended almost altogether on its productive efforts, so 
 that devotion to the interests of country took on an 
 entirely different meaning. Under this meaning we may 
 be permitted to rank as patriots all who are conscien- 
 tiously carrying forward in their country the work of the 
 world, inventors, artists, musicians, scientists, philoso- 
 phers, scholars, teachers, workmen, — all who are doing
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 55 
 
 their best to fill their places in their country and the 
 world, without fuss or complaint. All these are just as 
 truly entitled to admiration and praise as the warrior 
 who risks his life on the battlefield ; certainly a great 
 deal more than the man who goes into a war for what 
 he expects to make out of his share of the plunder, even 
 if we call it prize money. 
 
 Patriotism, then, on its intellectual side, is pretty 
 much the same thing as right reason ; on its moral side, 
 nearly the equivalent of good citizenship. But if there 
 is still a small field for the exercise of patriotism in the 
 old sense, it ought not to escape our attention that even 
 here its spirit has been profoundly modified, and in 
 what we call a necessary war the temper and feeling of 
 the citizen are not at all what they once were. It is 
 the theory, once closely approached in practice, that 
 where two communities are at war with each other, 
 every individual of the one is at war with every individ- 
 ual of the other, and his duty requires him to strive 
 to the uttermost for the destruction of his enemy. 
 All ties of friendship, kindred, humanity, sympathy, 
 community of thought were thus swept away. Patriot- 
 ism required the Jews absolutely to destroy the cities of 
 their enemies, not stopping with the slaughter of women, 
 but wreaking vengeance on unborn babes. It was in 
 supposed obedience to the divine command that Samuel, 
 in cold blood, hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. 
 In the exercise of patriotism, such as they understood it 
 to be, the American Indian inflicted upon his captive 
 the extremity of pain. But for a long time the rigors of 
 war have been abating. Even the soldiers feel little
 
 56 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 personal enmity towards each other. Citizens are usu- 
 ally safe in person and property ; and the conventions 
 of civilized nations forbid the employment of certain 
 destructive agencies in war. Thus in the field left to it 
 the old patriotism is losing its ferocity, its delight in 
 slaughter and destruction ; and while men may take 
 life in vainglory, they no longer often do it for pastime, 
 although we still blush to remember the chronicle of the 
 advent of the allied forces of " civilization " in China, 
 with its frightful recrudescence of barbarism. 
 
 We have seen how groups, from families to states, 
 tend to coalesce to form a larger unit. The primary end 
 we have found to be the elimination of antagonisms. In 
 the process one group is sometimes destroyed ; some- 
 times it becomes a vassal to the stronger. The larger 
 body sometimes goes to pieces, but the process of reunit- 
 ing the fragments is immediately renewed. Thus far we 
 have considered only integration brought about by con- 
 quest. We should miss the significance of this general 
 movement if we failed to note the influence of even more 
 potent factors. These did not manifest themselves to 
 any considerable degree during the period of chronic war, 
 but appeared immediately when peace became the nor- 
 mal condition. It then became evident that it was much 
 easier for man to supply his wants through industry 
 than through conquest. We shall accordingly see, in 
 the development of industries of all sorts, an irresistible 
 tendency in the direction of union or combination. The 
 primitive family supplied its wants directly through its 
 own efforts, conquest being one of them. Food, clothing, 
 implements, and weapons were home made, a rude barter
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 57 
 
 coming in at an early stage, but no community of effort 
 in production. Now, we shall find thousands of workmen 
 collected in the great mills, weaving cotton, woolen, and 
 silk, making shoes, clothing, tools, furniture, canned 
 goods, and the myriad appliances of modern life. Even 
 agriculture, the slowest of all industries to change, man- 
 ifests the same tendency. As yet not a great deal has 
 been done toward assimilating the industries of different 
 countries, though the effect of the one upon the other is 
 easily seen. 
 
 Trade or commerce is another agency, perhaps work- 
 ing still more powerfully to this end. In itself it pays 
 not the slightest attention to race, creeds, political bound- 
 aries, or social distinctions. It is purely a question of 
 buying and selling to advantage. Governments, for rea- 
 sons which they deem sufficient, interfere by means of 
 tariffs, restrictions, prohibitions, or monopolies; but trade 
 itself knows none of these, and would, subject to the 
 question of profit only, take the whole world into its 
 field. These two great factors, it should be noted, are 
 purely selfish or self-interested, working to economical 
 ends without the slightest sentiment. It is true that 
 there must be a large recognition of individual right and 
 a large measure of rectitude and fair dealing, but even 
 these are recognized as means to an end. 
 
 Upon this point it would be easy to enlarge ; but it is 
 not necessary to do more than point out the direction 
 of things. The growth of trades unions and organiza- 
 tions by which it is intended to control labor is a strik- 
 ing instance. The department store, by which nearly 
 everything wanted in a community is brought within a
 
 58 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 single building and controlled by a single head, is another. 
 The union of capital in the consolidation and manage- 
 ment of railways and steamships is a movement on a 
 great scale begun well within the memory of most of us. 
 
 Other factors making for the integration of mankind 
 grow more important with advancing civilization. Art, 
 music, literature, and science, for example, strive toward 
 certain ideals and care nothing whatever for race and 
 political separations. Difference in language and dis- 
 tance prevent to some extent the dissemination of ideas ; 
 but so they would do if all countries were united in one 
 body politic. The acceptance of ideas is not a matter of 
 nationality at all. Thought asks for no passport and 
 stops at no frontier. While, therefore, we may admire 
 the great achievements of our countrymen, our pride 
 must be based upon the value of their work and not 
 upon the fact that it is American. In the higher life of 
 the world there is no room for patriotism in the accepted, 
 vulgar sense. 
 
 I have left to the last the consideration which some 
 will think sufficient to determine the whole matter. In 
 what way is patriotism related to Christianity, meaning 
 not ecclesiastical bodies or so-called Christian nations, but 
 the teaching of Christ as to the social relations of men ? 
 Does this tend to the unification or to the separation of 
 the race — to divide men into diverse, hostile, or at best 
 indifferent groups, or to draw them together in common 
 interest, effort, and feeling ? I suppose that no one will 
 hesitate an instant for the answer. Now, if Christianity 
 is the basis of ethics, as most people believe, we shall 
 find therein a solution of all questions of national as well
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 59 
 
 as of personal conduct. Whether this is or is not the real 
 basis of ethics is immaterial. The belief that it is must 
 determine largely the feeling which we are to exercise 
 toward those of different nationality or race. It cannot 
 be that my conduct as a man is to be determined upon 
 the principles laid down by Jesus Christ, and my action 
 as a citizen upon principles absolutely in conflict with 
 them. 
 
 While it is true, therefore, that nominally Christian 
 nations have waged the most cruel and inhuman wars, 
 even in the name of Christ, that institutional Christianity 
 has retained many of the antagonisms under which the 
 race has groaned, and added yet others of its own, it is 
 yet true that the central thought of the Master, never 
 wholly lost or forgotten in the Church, the brotherhood 
 of man, is the most powerful of all factors working for 
 the unification and integration of humanity. If wars 
 are waged by Christian nations, it is not because of the 
 teachings of Christ, but in spite of them. If Christianity 
 is really to become the universal religion, necessarily it 
 must eliminate wars and all other antagonisms which 
 originated in and were necessary to the lower forms of 
 life, and which remain as a survival in the higher. The 
 principle which it applies to conduct — do unto others as 
 you would wish them to do unto you — is limited to no 
 class, condition, or circumstances, but is universal, cutting 
 across the lines of race, language, tradition, prejudice, 
 political jurisdiction, religion, creed, and ceremonial. It 
 is absolutely opposed to the local, the exclusive, the 
 particular, and accidental. It aims to bring all mankind 
 within the operation of a single law, to secure for every
 
 6o THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 human being the share that falls to him as one of the 
 children of the universal Father ; not such share as he 
 can grasp and hold by the strong hand, but that freely 
 and joyfully accorded him by every other person in recog- 
 nition of a common brotherhood ; not actual equality, 
 perhaps, but equal opportunity, equity, fairness, gener- 
 osity. In a community, in a world, where such a prin- 
 ciple of action prevails, what place is left for patriotism 
 in the offensive, popular sense of exclusive pride in our 
 own country and devotion to its selfish interests ? It is 
 the principle of Christianity which I here consider, not 
 its results as yet realized. Christianity has not yet had 
 its last word. That it will at last bring the reason and 
 conscience of mankind to the acceptance of the golden rule 
 I sincerely believe. Men may or may not think it of super- 
 natural origin. Because of what I conceive to be a gross 
 misunderstanding or willful perversion of the Master's 
 teaching I shall devote a special chapter to the considera- 
 tion of the teachings of Christ with reference to war. 
 
 We have seen a steady progress of unification from 
 the time when combination began to take the place of 
 the old antagonisms. We have seen the smaller groups 
 coalesce or become coordinated in a larger unit, until 
 at last the nation is formed. We have seen the forces 
 which are at work in this process. We have yet to 
 observe that it does not end with the nation. It is not 
 generally realized that the nations have been united for 
 certain purposes. There is no organic union, but a large 
 body of political and legal principles have secured just as 
 complete recognition among all civilized nations as have 
 the principles which regulate the rights of individuals
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 6l 
 
 in the State. Rights, privileges, and duties are defined 
 in what we call international law, — law not imposed by- 
 one nation upon another, but by each nation upon itself. 
 The code is still very imperfect, and no means of en- 
 forcing it as yet exist except the compulsion of the moral 
 sense of mankind, which each year grows more potent. 
 It does not pretend to regulate the entire conduct of a 
 nation toward its neighbors, any more than the municipal 
 law pretends to cover the entire conduct of the citizen. 
 Our own century has done more for the definition and 
 recognition of its principles than all which had preceded it. 
 The conference at The Hague did not result in all that 
 was hoped for it, or which might have been secured under 
 other conditions. We were unhappily engaged in a war 
 of conquest ; Great Britain was likewise handicapped by 
 its South African difficulty ; and Germany had wantonly 
 seized a portion of Chinese territory and did not choose 
 to defend itself in an international court. Nevertheless, 
 the establishment of a court, though not compelling arbi- 
 tration, is the most significant fact in nineteen centuries 
 of international development. Excepting in the class of 
 cases where the national honor is supposed to be involved, 
 the propriety and righteousness of arbitration were fully 
 recognized. With the ever- increasing pressure of moral 
 sentiment, we may reasonably look forward to the settle- 
 ment in the near future of all differences between nations 
 upon fixed legal principles. 
 
 Suppose we go a step farther. Let us conceive that 
 for certain large purposes, looking to the general utility, 
 the governments of the civilized world should join them- 
 selves by actual union, their duties and relations being
 
 62 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 defined by actual compact, any concrete case arising 
 to be construed in an international court. There would 
 thus be formed, for certain specified purposes, a republic 
 of nations, the members bearing toward it much the same 
 relation which our states bear to the general government. 
 Such a confederation is not only not impossible, but not at 
 all improbable. Nay, unless there is a change in the direc- 
 tion of the forces which during all these centuries have been 
 setting more and more strongly one way, it is a certainty, 
 though it would be rash to attempt to fix its advent. 
 
 He would have been a rash prophet, nay, a madman, 
 who, two centuries ago, had predicted the union of half 
 a hundred American communities in a single nation, and 
 that without conquest. It is only a little more than a 
 millennium since England consisted of seven separate and 
 warring governments. How many there were in Ireland, 
 Scotland, and Wales it would not be easy to say. The 
 union of these in the Kingdom of Great Britain was not 
 accomplished until the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, while the British Empire is a thing of our own 
 generation. The same is true of the German Empire. 
 Conquest, it is true, has been an element in this process, 
 but that which has lain behind it all is a clear perception 
 of the utility of such a union. To suppose that the 
 process has now stopped would be preposterous. That 
 the great nations will sometime be brought together in 
 voluntary and indissoluble bonds is as sure to my mind as 
 that " God is in his heaven." 
 
 What, then, will patriotism demand at our hands .'' Our 
 hands, I say, meaning those who shall follow us. We of 
 this generation may hope to see this only in vision, but
 
 THE ETHICS OF PATRIOTISM 63 
 
 even now it is our right to claim, through our efforts, 
 citizenship in that social New Jerusalem, the pattern of 
 which is already prepared in the heavens. Surely it will 
 not lead us to glorify the military prowess of that nation 
 of nations, since wars will be no longer possible, or if 
 they sometimes flash out, it will be like riots in our 
 cities, to be suppressed by the law, backed by the moral 
 sentiment of the world. Rather, it will demand loyalty 
 to the confederation which gives security to all races and 
 lands and leaves the nations free to follow their high- 
 est development, not groaning under the enormous bur- 
 dens of military establishments, nor forever on the watch 
 and shaking with dread of sudden destruction by some 
 stronger power. Patriotism will no longer relate to our 
 particular patria, — the United States, let us say, or the 
 state of Ohio, or the city of Washington, — and it will 
 not be called patriotism, but something higher. Let us 
 call it fellowship, if you please, brotherhood, humanism, 
 enthusiasm of humanity, civilization, Christianity, for it 
 will be the fruition of that Christianity taught by the 
 Master. It will mark the final substitution of right reason 
 for brute courage. Just as the latter lost its ferocity and 
 was transfused into mental and moral qualities as the old 
 individual antagonisms gave way, and finally found its 
 chief field not in war but in the arts of peace, so the new 
 patriotism will look upon the old glorification of war, the 
 fierce delight in slaughter and destruction, as wild deliri- 
 ums of fever, the ghastly and haggard nightmares of a 
 night that is past. 
 
 To this hope, to this ideal, let us yield our admiration, 
 our reverence, our obedience, our love. Toward it let
 
 64 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 US strive, though we may not attain. Sometime, some- 
 where, man will realize that for which we vainly yearn. 
 Humanity will cast away its cruel and foolish burden of 
 jealousy and antagonism, and with light heart and mutual 
 encouragement climb the long spirals of progress which 
 seem, indeed, ever to return upon themselves, but still 
 rise forever skyward. Whether there is a goal of perfec- 
 tion we cannot say, but surely the spiral will rise to clear 
 skies and a broad horizon, from which it will look back 
 upon what we call civilization with the same wonder and 
 repugnance with which we regard that geological period 
 when "a monstrous eft was of old the lord and master 
 of life."
 
 IV 
 
 CAN WAR BE DEFENDED ON THE AUTHORITY 
 OF CHRIST ? 
 
 It will probably not be questioned that what may be 
 classed as the Christian thought of this or almost any 
 civilized country embraces the greater proportion of its 
 trained intelligence. In this class we must reckon not the 
 members of churches only, but great numbers of our best 
 citizens who affiliate with them, and who through educa- 
 tion and inheritance adhere more or less closely to the 
 accepted religious beliefs. Still more emphatically is it 
 true that the class represents the highest development 
 of altruism, the loftiest motives, the most generous self- 
 sacrifice, the most unselfish lives. If united, therefore, 
 it is easy to see that it would dominate not merely 
 the domestic but the foreign policy of our government. 
 Doubtless it is fortunate that there has been little if 
 any tendency toward an ecclesiastical party, for reasons 
 which I need not specifically point out, but which may 
 be easily gathered from what follows. Now, it is very 
 remarkable, but I think quite plain, that this body of 
 thought will generally be found favoring the most self- 
 ish, indiscriminate, brutal, wasteful, and most ineffectual 
 means of settling differences among men. In theory it 
 is opposed to war, but very rarely in a concrete instance. 
 If it does not actively champion, it hardly ever squarely 
 
 65
 
 66 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 sets itself against it. A very large proportion of the 
 wars of the last ten centuries have turned upon or 
 involved religious questions. One country easily con- 
 demns the war undertaken by another, but never its 
 own. During the War of the Rebellion the ears of the 
 Almighty were assailed with the frantic cries of Chris- 
 tians on both sides for the destruction of their fellow 
 citizens and Christian brethren. The war with Spain 
 and the prolonged struggle in the Philippines received 
 the somewhat exuberant approval of this class; and the 
 same was true in England concerning the Boer War. 
 This was, of course, far from unanimous ; and in our case 
 it may be conceded that it was given somewhat grudg- 
 ingly at the outset, but with the outbreak of hostilities 
 all reluctance disappeared. The class called for further 
 bloodshed in China, not in direct terms, but as a neces- 
 sary consequence. It insisted that its missions should be 
 maintained and extended by military force, if need be. 
 
 Now, if Christianity were a mere extension of the old 
 Judaism, this attitude would not be hard to understand. 
 In that religion Jahveh was primarily a tribal war god, 
 who afterwards attached himself to the soil or terri- 
 tory occupied by his chosen people. Outside of this he 
 claimed no jurisdiction and cared nothing for what took 
 place. He exacted no worship, and left other peoples to 
 the management of their own particular gods. He was, 
 however, extremely jealous of the homage of his own 
 people, and for any infraction of his rights visited them 
 with terrible punishments. He entered into a solemn 
 covenant with them, by which, so long as they faithfully 
 observed their obligation, he undertook not only to
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 6/ 
 
 protect them from attack but to enable them, through his 
 direct aid and leadership, to conquer and destroy their 
 neighbors and enter into possession of their lands. Thus 
 religion reenforced the lower instincts of men by mak- 
 ing robbery and murder a religious duty. By stimulat- 
 ing and approving their natural selfishness and greed, it 
 intensified the antagonisms which we have seen to be 
 inevitable in the beginnings of life. Up to the time of 
 Christ the Jewish mind had failed to grasp the idea of 
 the fatherhood of God and the unity of the human race. 
 Jahveh was, popularly speaking, the God of the Jew only. 
 Of course their conception broadened, in spite of the 
 efforts of their priests and teachers to shut them up to 
 the narrower view. Whether the result was, on the whole, 
 bad or good is of no concern to the present contention. 
 
 To a greater extent than is generally realized, these 
 ideas passed into Christianity. They have never been 
 wholly eliminated, though greatly modified. During its 
 infancy Christianity naturally looked for the same kind 
 of protection against violence from without which Juda- 
 ism had claimed for itself. When it became strong 
 enough to seize the secular power it sought to use it, 
 as the Jews had done, for the extension of the kingdom 
 of God. Until the temporal power was lost to the Pope, 
 there was never any doubt as to the right and duty of 
 employing it directly for the destruction of heathen or 
 heretical governments and institutions. Upon the ashes 
 of pagan fanes it has reared its temples, bearing aloft the 
 symbol of passive suffering. In the blood-soaked soil of 
 ruined nations it has planted the laurel and the bay, from 
 which to gather its garlands to deck the brow which wore
 
 68 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 the crown of thorns. It has never hesitated to claim that 
 its devastating armies were led by the Prince of Peace. 
 
 It seems, indeed, as if Christianity has felt compelled 
 to propagate itself by any means which came to its hand. 
 Holding its doctrines and practice to be of the supremest 
 importance to man, whose eyes are blinded and whose 
 will is paralyzed by sin, its devotees have felt that they 
 were doing the noblest service in compelling him to 
 accept that salvation without which he is doomed. So 
 far the feeling is not indeed selfish, however misguided. 
 Selfishness has, however, always availed itself of the zeal 
 of the Church to secure its own ends. Traditional Chris- 
 tianity itself has never stopped to inquire whether men 
 desire it. From its vantage ground it has said they need 
 and must have it, whether they will or no. It was in 
 the ages of faith, when no doubt perplexed the heart 
 of the Church, that its zeal for propagandism was at 
 its height. It is only in modern times, when largely 
 infused with the secular reason, that it has come to see 
 that religion cannot be imposed upon men by force, and 
 so has consented to give up the sword to the civil 
 authorities. But while it no longer insists upon war as 
 a direct instrumentality for the introduction of Christian- 
 ity or the suppression of heresy, it is exceedingly prone 
 to see in it new opportunities for forwarding its interests. 
 It has become sensitive to the odium of bloodshed, but 
 is willing that the State should incur the reproach while 
 it, as a silent partner, reaps the benefit. It has lost much 
 of its old relish for martyrdom also, and is satisfied to 
 allow the army to be a sort of John the Baptist, prepar- 
 ing its way and making its paths safe.
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 69 
 
 Let me absolutely disclaim any intent to minimize the 
 importance of Christianity in its essential doctrines and 
 nature. I am speaking of organized Christianity, as 
 represented by those who have controlled its movements 
 rather than its life and growth. Perhaps I should have 
 spoken of it as ecclesiasticism, though the attitude I have 
 described seems to be that of all but a small minority of 
 Christians. Above all, I should regret to have it supposed 
 that I could speak slightingly of those engaged in mis- 
 sionary work. Among the good men and women whom 
 it has been my happy privilege to know, some of the 
 very noblest, most unselfish, and most lovable have been 
 of this class. Nor do I stigmatize the Church for its past 
 history, which, taking all things into account, could not 
 probably have been other than it has been, for like every- 
 thing else it is a product of the circumstances in which 
 it has been placed. I am trying to account for what 
 appears to me a most remarkable and perplexing fact. 
 I believe the Church means to be loyal to its founder, 
 yet at the same time has entirely perverted his teaching 
 on a point upon which the whole turns. It is its very 
 zeal to carry out the instructions of the Master which 
 has led it into the repudiation of the fundamental princi- 
 ple which he laid down. " Go ye into all the world and 
 preach the gospel to every creature " was his command. 
 But if in some places this creature shall refuse to receive 
 me, and upon my benevolent persistence shall oppose 
 my entrance, and to my preaching reply with blows, 
 what then ? Meet violence with violence is the practi- 
 cal answer, not for yoiu" own sake but for his. When 
 you have convinced the misguided wretch of your physical
 
 70 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 superiority he will be ready to see the superiority of 
 your religion. This is not merely a horrible perversion 
 of the teaching of Christ ; it is grotesque. If it were not 
 the most solemn and terrible thing in the world, it would 
 be the most humorous. 
 
 It is not in the least unusual for men to carry about 
 in their heads ideas that are utterly inconsistent and 
 even contradictory without knowing it. But here we 
 are discussing not a question of reason, but of author- 
 ity only ; not whether the teaching of Christ is right, 
 though I believe it is, but what the teaching was. If 
 this is clear and certain, it is for the Church to say 
 whether it will accept it or repudiate it. If for any rea- 
 son it thinks it is not now binding upon the world, it is 
 for it to explain on what principle it may be rejected. 
 If it is able calmly to set it aside, it should further 
 explain what it understands by the headship of Christ, 
 and whether the rest of his teaching can in like manner 
 be disregarded. 
 
 It will nowhere be questioned, within the Church or 
 outside of it, that at the beginning of his ministry Christ 
 came with a message of peace, the same which, accord- 
 ing to Luke, the angels announced at his birth. The 
 kingdom of God which it was his immediate mission to 
 establish was a brotherhood of man. It swept away all 
 class privilege and placed all upon an absolute equality 
 of right, under the operation of a single controlling prin- 
 ciple, — the law of love. The kingdom of heaven belonged 
 to the poor in spirit. It was the meek who were to inherit 
 the earth. Not only was it forbidden that one should 
 be angry with his brother; he might not, until he had
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST yi 
 
 exhausted every effort, allow his brother to be angry 
 with him. If at the altar he remembered that his brother 
 had against him any cause for complaint, reasonable or 
 otherwise, his first duty was not sacrifice but reconciliation. 
 Not only so, but he must love his enemies. The doctrine 
 of non-resistance is as clearly and unmistakably set forth 
 as language can state it. " Resist not him that is evil ; 
 but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to 
 him the other also." They might not avail themselves 
 of the civil courts in any differences with outsiders. If 
 one should seek through legal process to take the coat, 
 they must tender the cloak also. 
 
 Let it be conceded that this is pressing the principle 
 very far, quite exceeding the requirement of the golden 
 rule, which exacted such treatment of another as one 
 might properly ask to receive. This, to a right-minded 
 person, would be fairness. It is no part of the present 
 purpose to inquire whether the doctrine of non-resistance 
 is sound, but merely whether Christ consistently taught 
 it. If it is not binding upon the Church, it is because of 
 one or the other of two things : either the doctrine was 
 inherently unsound and Christ was mistaken in hold- 
 ing it, or, while it was correctly held and taught in the 
 beginning, he at a later time changed his mind. The 
 theological consequence is the same: one of these views 
 is erroneous. It does not help matters to say that con- 
 ditions had changed. As a matter of fact, they had not 
 within the few months that had intervened between the 
 first and last utterance. But there is not the slightest 
 hint that either teaching is for a temporary condition or 
 related to the conduct of the disciples only. Everything
 
 72 
 
 TfiE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 indicates that it was a principle laid down for all time. 
 Did altered conditions abrogate the golden rule ? Did 
 Christ advise his followers that in the changed condi- 
 tions they should repay evil with evil ? If he was wildly 
 visionary at the outset, how does the Church reconcile 
 this fact with its teaching that he was "very God of 
 very God " ? Asa fact, slowly changing conditions have 
 not made the lofty altruism of Christ less, but far more 
 practicable. 
 
 We must not lose sight of the question raised. What 
 authority for war can be found in the teachings of Christ ? 
 The appeal is to the record ; it_ is a matter of interpreta- 
 tion only. What men who think they accept Christ's 
 teachings believe to be right or expedient has nothing 
 to do with the inquiry. When we come to put together 
 the utterances upon which they argue that he approved 
 or permitted war we shall see what a very slender 
 foundation they have for the tremendous inference, logi- 
 cally dragging down his whole teaching and destroying 
 at a blow the accepted theory of his nature. 
 
 According to Matthew, in sending forth his disciples 
 he said : " Think not that I came to send peace on the 
 earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I 
 came to set a man at variance against his father, and the 
 daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law 
 against her mother in law; and a man's foes shall be 
 they of his own household." Now it may be conceded 
 that Christ foresaw future wars as a consequence of two 
 contending systems of thought and conduct ; but this is 
 not a necessary inference from the language. He did 
 foresee that his teachings would meet with opposition,
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 73 
 
 and he expressly warns his disciples to expect it. But 
 this opposition is not that of one community against 
 another. Division is to run not on political lines, but 
 through all communities and cutting asunder the ties 
 of family life. At a later date he did predict wars, — 
 " Nation shall rise against nation and kingdom against 
 kingdom," — but in these, so far as the record goes, his 
 followers were to have no part. They are not to be ter- 
 rified when they hear of wars and tumults. Their trials 
 were to come in a different way. Parents and brethren 
 and kinsfolk and friends would deliver them up to the 
 authorities; but there is no suggestion that they should 
 be involved in wars, or that they should resort to any 
 violence. There will be great destruction of the Jews, 
 and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles; 
 but "your redemption draweth nigh." 
 
 But returning to the account in Matthew, the disci- 
 ples were sent on their mission without any of those 
 provisions which worldly prudence would dictate. They 
 were to take neither money nor food nor change of 
 raiment. They would be brought into courts ; but they 
 were to have no anxiety and make no preparation. "It 
 shall be given you in that hour what ye shall speak." 
 He counsels no resistance, much less the use of offensive 
 force. " When they persecute you in this city, flee 
 into the next"; and apparently he does not look for any 
 long-continued opposition, for " Ye shall not have gone 
 through the cities of Israel till the Son of man be come." 
 Now, taking this together, it shows that he looked for 
 opposition and persecution, but it utterly fails to show 
 that he contemplated or permitted the use of force in
 
 74 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 any shape or degree on the part of his followers. Imag- 
 ine from his lips in this connection an exhortation to the 
 warlike life ! 
 
 There are perhaps one or two other passages slightly 
 varying this language, but in nowise changing its sig- 
 nificance. There is also a passage, found only in Luke, 
 which on its face seems to sanction the use of force. 
 After the last supper at Jerusalem, just before Christ's 
 parting from his disciples, he says to them : " When I 
 sent you forth without purse, and wallet, and shoes, lacked 
 ye anything ? " And they said, " Nothing." " But now," 
 he replies, " he that hath a purse, let him take it, and 
 likewise a wallet : and he that hath none, let him sell his 
 cloak, and buy a sword. For I say unto you, that this 
 which is written must be fulfilled in me : And Jie zuas 
 reckoned with transgressors ^ And they said, " Lord, 
 behold, here are two swords." And he said unto them, 
 "It is enough." 
 
 Enough for wJtiat .'' To suppose that he could have 
 meant that the possession of two swords by his disciples 
 was a sufficient preparation to meet force with force, 
 much less to commence a campaign of violence for the 
 spread of his teaching, is too absurd for the most robust 
 credulity. To resort to such an interpretation, unless 
 the language absolutely requires it, is contrary to every 
 principle of exegesis ; it sets aside the presumption 
 that Christ manifested at least the intelligence of ordi- 
 nary men. 
 
 But it is on its moral still more than on its intellectual 
 side that such an interpretation is most repugnant. We 
 might conceive that the great success of his ministry in
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 75 
 
 Galilee had warped the judgment of Christ, as we know 
 it had that of his followers. But to suppose that he had 
 set aside the fundamental principle which he came to 
 proclaim is to deprive his life and teaching of all moral 
 significance. It would be to revise the beatitudes. It is 
 no longer the meek who should inherit the earth, but 
 the man on horseback. 
 
 Fortunately there is not the slightest necessity for 
 such an interpretation. Beyond all controversy the 
 evangelist here cites a Scripture prophecy which Christ 
 declares is about to be fulfilled. What is that predic- 
 tion ? Obviously that contained in the words, " And he 
 was reckoned with the transgressors." The Greek word 
 is avojKov — the lawless. But while Jesus may have 
 treated Jewish ceremonial with scant respect, he had 
 never violated municipal law nor countenanced its vio- 
 lation by others. He had paid tribute or poll tax like 
 any good citizen. Whatever his feeling toward the 
 Roman government may have been, he had carefully 
 avoided any utterance which might be construed as 
 treasonable or unfriendly to Caesar. But now, in fulfill- 
 ment of this Scripture, he must in some way be classed 
 as a law-breaker. How was this to be done .? For his 
 followers to offer resistance to the officer of the law 
 would be on his part a technical breach of the law. For 
 this purpose two swords are enough. It is highly prob- 
 able, too, that the carrying of arms by a Jew was for- 
 bidden, and was thus an actual offense. 
 
 T do not know but this explanation is very trite. My 
 knowledge of Scripture commentary is of the slightest, 
 as I have never had a taste for that form of literature.
 
 -je THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 Once pointed out, however, the meaning of the pas- 
 sage is so clear that only the most ingenious perversity 
 could construe it as an approval of the use of violence in 
 any case. 
 
 If it be said that this is a far-fetched prophecy with a 
 feeble fulfillment, I answer that the difficulty is not of 
 my making. If the incident is not historical, no argument 
 can be based upon it. If the writer has misstated or mis- 
 applied the words of Christ, any inference that he justi- 
 fied war under any circumstances is just as obviously a 
 mistaken one. I merely insist that I have given the plain 
 meaning of the text, the construction which Luke himself 
 puts upon it. It is in complete harmony with what fol- 
 lows. It is Peter, always hot-headed, who draws his sword 
 and cuts off the ear of the officer or attendant, " the serv- 
 ant of the high priest." " Put up again thy sword into its 
 place" is the rather stern command, "for all they that 
 take the sword shall perish by the sword." He immedi- 
 ately turns the incident into a moral object lesson, the 
 same which he has all along taught. " Suffer ye thus 
 far," or "suffer even this," he says, and with a touch 
 he heals the wound. He might, he affirms, bring to 
 his aid more than twelve legions of angels ; but to use 
 force, even a supernatural force, would be to defeat his 
 moral purpose. To Pilate he says : "If my kingdom 
 were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I 
 should not be delivered to the Jews." It was because it 
 was a spiritual kingdom that it might not be maintained 
 by the means employed by earthly monarchs. His own 
 example gave a force and meaning to his teaching that 
 could have been secured in no other way. It was not so
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST T"] 
 
 much his preaching in Galilee as his death on the cross 
 that has won for him his mighty following. It was the 
 complete exemplification of all that for which his life 
 and teachings had stood. Not alone to his disciples, but 
 to all men, he taught the lesson the world is so slow to 
 receive, — the power of love to conquer evil. 
 
 If in view of changing circumstances or of his own 
 removal from them, Jesus had meant to give a new 
 rule, to indoctrinate his disciples with those considera- 
 tions of worldly prudence of which men in general 
 have something of a superfluity, there was a singular 
 inconsistency between his words and his actions. Indeed, 
 we must think his language was strangely inappropri- 
 ate to his meaning. Some of his followers were quite 
 quick enough to meet force with force. They had really 
 almost entirely failed to grasp the idea of a spiritual 
 kingdom. They had been anxious to call down fire 
 upon those who had refused to receive them, but who 
 had offered no violence at all. It was the mild, spiritual, 
 beloved John, not the quick, impulsive Peter, who had 
 wished to pour these literal coals of fire on the heads of 
 those who had perhaps at farthest shown them some 
 disrespect. They had quarreled with each other as to 
 who should have the highest place in the kingdom. Yet 
 not one of them understood Christ to be instructing 
 them to resort to the agencies upon which the world 
 relies and to meet force with force. On the contrary, 
 they now for the first time began to have some dim con- 
 ception of his spiritual mission. His patient endurance 
 of wrong, his unjust sufferings, his meek obedience unto 
 death, his prayer, in the midst of the agony of the cross,
 
 78 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 for those who were inflicting this upon him, completed 
 the lesson. The disciples went everywhere, unarmed and 
 unresisting, carrying only the message of love. They 
 shrank from no persecutions nor danger, and seemed to 
 seek out opportunities for martyrdom. They met with 
 shame and scoffing, with imprisonment and stripes, and 
 finally with violent death ; but not one, so far as we 
 know, offered any resistance or raised even the slightest 
 complaint. Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, even 
 more fully, though not more clearly, set forth the doc- 
 trine of non-resistance. More than this, he illustrated it 
 by his life ; but at the same time his language is full of 
 the imagery of war. The Christian is a soldier. Life is 
 a warfare. The believer must put on " the whole armor 
 of God," "the breastplate of righteousness," and "the 
 helmet of salvation." With girt loins he must take 
 "the shield of faith" and "the sword of the spirit." 
 Yet it is not with flesh and blood that he is to wrestle, 
 and he must have his feet shod with "the preparation 
 of the gospel of peace.'' This sword of the spirit may 
 well be the sword which Christ says it was his mission 
 to send. If it is a consolation to any one to think 
 that he foresaw the great religious wars that were to 
 come through a perversion of his teachings, I surely 
 will not deny him that comfort. Certainly he never 
 authorized these wars, or gave any hint toward their 
 justification. 
 
 Whether the teaching of Jesus is practicable I shall 
 consider in another chapter. I believe that I have fairly 
 shown here, upon the most obvious and reasonable con- 
 struction of the few passages in which justification of
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 79 
 
 war is sought, that he did not allow the use of force even 
 in self-defense. If a different interpretation is possible, 
 it is certainly not the necessary nor the natural one. It 
 will be readily conceded, on the other hand, — indeed I 
 do not suppose that it has ever been questioned, — that 
 he clearly and unmistakably taught the doctrine of non- 
 resistance, the passive endurance of wrong ; that he fully 
 exemplified this doctrine in his life and in his death ; 
 that it is as fully set forth, with as complete impHcation 
 that it was a universal principle, for all circumstances 
 and times, as the law of love, — in fact, that it is a part 
 of that ; that his disciples perfectly understood his teach- 
 ings on this point and, though some of them were hot- 
 blooded enough, followed his teaching and example with 
 the most remarkable devotion. The example of the dis- 
 ciples was in turn followed by primitive Christianity ; 
 it was only when the new faith had become firmly estab- 
 lished that force was thought of either for protection or 
 as a means of propagandism. 
 
 Whether it is possible to live without war would 
 seem, therefore, to depend entirely on the desire and 
 will. If there are any circumstances under which the 
 teaching of Christ would allow it, it would appear that 
 it is in case of self-defense. But during the whole 
 period of its weakness Christianity found it perfectly 
 practicable and expedient to get along without it. Only 
 after Christianity grew strong and did not need it for 
 protection, it began to use it, because it believed, or 
 affected to believe, that the spread of its influence jus- 
 tified the use of violence. It is the argument that is still 
 used, but not in a shape quite so offensive.
 
 8o THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 If fully satisfied that Jesus approved or permitted 
 war, Christianity should rest in that conviction, since it 
 holds that he spoke with absolute and final authority. 
 In fact, it is not and never has been satisfied. The con- 
 tradiction between this and the doctrine of non-resistance 
 is too plain to be ignored by the most hardened believer. 
 It is driven at the outset to apology. The only explana- 
 tion it can off^ is that he changed his view. The neces- 
 sary consequence is to conclude that the doctrine of 
 non-resistance was impracticable, and that his earlier 
 teaching was a delusion. But with the ever-widening 
 sense of human brotherhood, the conviction has deep- 
 ened that the law of love is the permanent and universal 
 rule for the guidance of human conduct, and that war 
 with its dreadful destruction and enormous suffering 
 cannot be reconciled with it. Christianity has therefore 
 shifted its ground. Oh, yes, war is horrible, and Christ 
 did not approve of it as a permanent principle ; but he 
 allowed it for a season because in the state of society 
 which he found and which he left it is unavoidable. There 
 will come a time of universal peace, — in the millennium. 
 War has not been eliminated, because the evil passions 
 of men, their selfishness, sin, and folly have not been 
 eliminated. When Christianity is everywhere accepted 
 war will cease. Very good. War is permissible, then, 
 because based on the selfishness, folly, and sin of men. 
 Christ sanctioned it because it is sinful or selfish. But 
 this will apply equally to lying, stealing, burglary, arson, 
 and murder. 
 
 Perhaps I do not need to call attention to the fact that 
 this is also an entire abandonment of the argument from
 
 ON THE AUTHORITY OF CHRIST 8l 
 
 authority, which must be sought in what Christ said, not 
 in what we think he ought to have said. To say that war 
 is a necessity, and that therefore Christ allowed it, is 
 moreover a mere begging of the question. To say that 
 he changed his final instructions because, being divine, 
 he must have given such as are practicable, is open to 
 the same objection. We cannot frame conclusions for 
 him, but accept such as are fairly indicated in his recorded 
 utterances as the basis of our own. For those that really 
 accept the divinity of Christ to set a certain standard 
 to which the divine wisdom must conform is riot merely 
 absurd but impious. Shift the ground as we may, there- 
 fore, no justification of war can be found in the words or 
 acts of Christ. If war is defensible, it must be upon 
 grounds of reason. Thou appealest unto Caesar; to 
 Caesar thou shalt go.
 
 V 
 
 CAN WAR BE DEFENDED ON GROUNDS OF 
 REASON ? 
 
 It will be well at the outset to define the precise point 
 at issue. It is not the question whether at some period 
 in the life of the race, under the conditions which existed 
 and with the mental and moral development which had 
 been attained, war was a necessity and so justifiable, but 
 whether it is so now. It is not even whether now a 
 community may justifiably defend itself if attacked. It 
 would be as pertinent to raise that question in the case 
 of the individual ; it would be merely asking whether it 
 is justifiable to live. But it takes two parties to engage 
 in war, and if one has, in all the steps which led up to it, 
 been striving to avoid any just offense, the other must 
 just as certainly have been striving to secure an unjust 
 advantage. If one is truly the helpless victim, the other 
 is as certainly the wanton aggressor. In fact, these 
 unmixed conditions rarely present themselves in modern 
 warfare, both parties being controlled largely by their 
 traditions and prejudices. At the best, the rational 
 motive on the one side is balanced by the irrational one 
 on the other. There are reasons and reasons on the part 
 of both, it may be ; but from the standpoint of reason 
 itself there may be no justification of this particular war. 
 Reason puts itself outside of the particular motives and 
 
 82
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 83 
 
 views of the parties to the strife, to consider whether 
 the end gained justifies the means employed ; whether, 
 taking all the results into the account, not to this party 
 or that, nor even to both, but as affecting the whole 
 race, there has been a gain which will equal the loss. It 
 is not a question whether wars will cease in the immedi- 
 ate or distant future, but whether from the standpoint of 
 reason they ought to. No one supposes that lying, rob- 
 bery, arson, murder, and other crimes will cease ; but 
 they are not approved by reason. The inquiry is whether 
 war, as an instrumentality, on the whole serves a useful 
 purpose. It is the same question which arises in indi- 
 vidual misunderstandings and wrongs. Does the duel, 
 the street fight, the mob, serve a useful purpose .^ ^ That 
 some incidental good comes from these, in certain rare 
 cases, may be conceded ; but does it overbalance the 
 evils, or has it been economically obtained ? Does it 
 bear a fair proportion to the expenditure of effort ? 
 Those engaged in them have, it may be, at the time 
 
 1 A good illustration comes to hand as I am preparing this chapter. 
 In a Southern village a negro had been confined in the calaboose 
 to await trial. Some citizens, in the exercise of zeal for the public 
 good, attacked the building and set fire to it, after killing the prisoner. 
 This was quite in accord with the prevailing sentiment of the com- 
 munity, and if not actively commended would under ordinary circum- 
 stances have been approved. It chanced that the blazing calaboose set 
 fire to an adjoining building, and that to another, and finally the busi- 
 ness part of the village was wiped out. This was not what was bar- 
 gained for, and the indignation of those who had lost their property 
 waxed hot against the mob, and four or five members of it were indicted 
 by the grand jury. Now, if it were apparent to the community that 
 every act of violence by the individual, mob, or state was going to cost 
 it something, for which a very insignificant benefit would accrue, such 
 outbreaks would cease to have apologists.
 
 84 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 found reasons to justify their acts ; but shall we ? If it 
 were a question whether passion and prejudice will con- 
 tinue, I should not care to argue the case ; but it will 
 not be alleged that these are rational. If war is defensi- 
 ble on rational grounds, it must be shown that it works 
 again — material, mental, or moral — which could not 
 have been secured in some other way, or at least without 
 greater expense. It is not enough to show that some 
 gains follow war, unless it also appears that these could 
 not have been as fully secured under conditions of peace. 
 We know very well the great increase in strength, vigor, 
 activity, and zest for life which often follows a fever 
 that has brought one near the gates of death ; but not 
 many will regard the fever as a desirable agency for the 
 attainment of health. So much good follows shipwreck 
 that there is a class of people who think it proper to help 
 bring it about by placing false lights to mislead the pilot. 
 There is one consideration, and one only, which seems 
 to me to be entitled to weight, and which it is not 
 altogether easy to answer. Pit is that w^ar is a necessity, 
 and however earnestly men may strive to avoid it, they 
 are unable to do so. There is a kind of fate in it, and 
 nations are driven to it because in the very nature of 
 things it must be so. It is like sickness, pain, and death, 
 — and, however unpleasant, we must submit. The in- 
 stinct for fighting is imbedded deeply in the constitu- 
 tion of things. Conflict goes on incessantly among all 
 forms of life. Life, in fact, begins in a sort of conflict, 
 a reaction against its environment. We cannot observe 
 it nor know whether it exists disassociated from a physi- 
 cal organism, but far back as we may go we find some
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 85 
 
 portion of this organism moved by an inward force which 
 we must conclude to be the " Httle Hving will." The 
 latter we do not pretend to explain. It is part of the 
 mystery of life itself. The movement of the organism 
 thus set up impinges upon something fixed or relatively 
 immobile in the external world, which through reac- 
 tion propels the entire organism through space. Thus, 
 in amoebse, microscopic bits of colorless jelly, without 
 organs, a slight protuberance is thrust out from the 
 body and withdrawn, the principle being something like 
 that employed in sculling. In others of these rudimen- 
 tary forms of life, two exceedingly delicate threads which 
 may be regarded as oars are waved about in the water. 
 From these up to man and in all the complicated move- 
 ments which he imparts to matter there is in this respect 
 no change of principle. All are exemplifications of the 
 law of action and reaction. Without resistance there 
 could be no motion. All this is profoundly true. 
 
 When it comes to the preservation and development 
 of life it is the same. The creature must have food, and 
 is thus brought into competition with other forms of life 
 whose interests and wills are absolutely antagonistic. 
 This has been indicated in the preceding chapters ; but 
 to let the argument for war be made as complete as pos- 
 sible, I will outline the general course of development 
 from a slightly different point of view. At the threshold 
 of life we find two organisms, one of which must be 
 destroyed for the benefit of the other. It is not a matter 
 of sentiment but necessity. There is no other food sup- 
 ply than that found in existing forms of life. There is no 
 possibility of increasing resources by effort. If the two
 
 86 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 do not come into direct collision through the attempt 
 to eat each other, they will in their efforts to appropri- 
 ate a third. Nay, the antagonism goes far beyond this. 
 Since life feeds only on life, to bring one form to matu- 
 rity involves the sacrifice of a multitude of others. The 
 process does not cease with man. No adult man or 
 woman exists to whose development countless myriads 
 of lower forms have not contributed. Not only so, but 
 all superiority has come from struggle. The exercise of 
 existing powers brings increase of strength, adaptation, 
 and facility. Any slight modification which proved use- 
 ful would tend not only to perpetuate itself, but through 
 greater and greater extension would finally develop into 
 special organs. 
 
 The law of increase and perfection through use holds 
 good also throughout the mental and moral world. The 
 civilized man, no less than the savage, has attained only 
 because he has striven. Civilization has indeed provided 
 largely for the protection of the weak, but it is for his 
 preservation only. He can rise only through struggle, 
 which has indeed changed the objects toward which 
 strife is directed, but makes it none the less exacting. 
 Conflict, therefore, must go on to the end. To put an 
 end to war — that is the argument — is to arrest human 
 development. In the whole order of things, including 
 man and society, the strong has always dominated the 
 weak. It may give a shock to the moral sense, but we 
 are helpless to change the order imposed upon us from 
 without, even though we may conceive that it is wrong. 
 
 This is as full and fair a statement of this argu- 
 ment in favor of or excuse for war as the limits of this
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 87 
 
 discussion will allow. The data for its refutation also 
 have been given in the preceding discussion. I need 
 here only state some of the generalizations reached or 
 easily deducible therefrom. We have noticed that the 
 absolute antagonisms pertain only to the lowest forms 
 of life, and that they have steadily diminished with the 
 rising scale ; that at quite an early period some combi- 
 nation and cooperation began ; that with this, possibly 
 before, the mental development began to be more impor- 
 tant than mere physical superiority. We have seen also 
 that the struggles in the earliest stages of life related 
 wholly to food. This was the case also with the primi- 
 tive man. The argument from analogy would lead to 
 the conclusion that our wars should be only to obtain 
 food, and that having slain our foe we should eat him. 
 
 But we saw that with the lower animals combination 
 led to no increase of production ; it was only a means of 
 more easily reducing to possession the things that nature 
 had provided ready-made. The use of tools was wholly 
 unknown to them, and even with primitive man there 
 had as yet come no thought of adding to that which 
 nature had provided. His tools would be only sticks or 
 stones, which the development of the hand enabled him 
 to grasp, and these made him, in combination with his 
 fellows, superior to the most formidable animals, such as 
 the cave bear and lion. In this combination, and for the 
 successful use of these primitive weapons, it is apparent 
 that cunning and skill were more important than strength. 
 The mental development rather than the physical gave 
 to man the first place in the animal scale. As this men- 
 tal development went on it finally dawned upon him that
 
 88 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 he could add to the products of nature. We need not 
 follow the steps. The time came when that which nature 
 had provided was trifling compared with that which he 
 could produce from her stores. He has not yet fairly 
 realized that the resources of nature are practically infi- 
 nite ; but he begins to see that for the economical exploi- 
 tation of these he needs the help of his fellows, working 
 in all directions, since progress in any direction makes 
 progress in every other easier. In all this the use of his 
 muscular powers steadily gave way to the devices con- 
 trived by his mental powers, and one force of nature was 
 used to manipulate another. What we call hand labor is 
 not that at all. But while much of this is required in 
 some lines of work, it is greatly outweighed by the 
 forces of nature applied to the machinery and contriv- 
 ances of man. In by far the greater sphere of human 
 industry the possession of great physical strength is of 
 little or no advantage, while skill and dexterity are indis- 
 pensable. Brawn is now at the foot in the industrial 
 scale and receives the smallest reward. Physical devel- 
 opment, except so far as it contributes to health, is of no 
 importance to a very large proportion of the human race. 
 The combination of men, in the beginning, we may 
 be perfectly certain, was for purely utilitarian purposes. 
 There were at this stage no government, no law, no soci- 
 ety, no settled customs of any sort. There was no affec- 
 tion on man's part toward his fellow, the members of 
 his family possibly excepted. But combination involves 
 the suspension, at least, of the old antagonisms. He 
 gave up some things in order that he might gain more. 
 The consequence, beyond the immediate end, was not
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 89 
 
 perceived probably at all, and would not have seemed 
 an object worth striving after. As everywhere else, men 
 here moved along the lines of least resistance, supplying 
 the necessities with the smallest expenditure of effort. 
 But this was a matter of give and take, and the conces- 
 sion of something to another soon begot the idea of per- 
 sonal and property rights. The areas of antagonism, 
 therefore, constantly diminished, while the community 
 of interest as constantly increased. 
 
 Now, if this law holds good throughout, we may say 
 that the time will come when all antagonisms will be 
 eliminated, and community of interest will become uni- 
 versal. I do not mean by this that there will be common 
 possession of property ; for so far, through all this pro- 
 gression, the right of property has been more and more 
 distinctly recognized. With closer association and com- 
 mon interests, the altruistic spirit found a great devel- 
 opment. In just what it had its beginning it is not 
 necessary here to decide. I do not accept the view of 
 Mr. Fiske that it originated in and because of the length- 
 ened period of infancy in the human race, as it surely 
 existed in a rudimentary form very far back of man. It 
 would be hard to show, likewise, that affection for off- 
 spring is different in the case of man and the lower animals, 
 except that in the first case it may be associated with 
 greater prudence and intelligence ; nor does it appear 
 even that it is more intense. In both cases it serves its 
 purpose of protecting the young until they are ready to 
 shift for themselves.! It seems to me that it would have 
 
 1 It is in order, also, to inquire whether Mr. Fiske has not put the 
 cause for the effect. Since life always and everywhere does not what it
 
 90 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 its beginning in the first community of interest, and this 
 would be found almost at the basis of life, in sex. But to 
 whatever circumstance its inception may be due, there can 
 be no doubt that in its development it has kept equal step 
 with the human race. If I am correct in my view of its 
 evolution, the condition of society at a given stage has not 
 been the planned effort of an earlier age, but an unfore- 
 seen result. Institutions and social forms have not been 
 a definite object to strive for, but have grown out of 
 usage, acquiesced in for a considerable period. They do 
 not represent aspiration so much as history. They are 
 a mere crystallization and hardening of precedent. 
 Immediate utilitarian ends have always been the object, 
 but greater ends have been achieved unsought. Through- 
 out his whole history man has sought to supply his wants 
 and desires in the easiest way. To what his efforts will 
 finally lead, what the ultimate power in the universe has 
 planned for him, we need not determine. 
 y Wars have been waged, therefore, because they seemed 
 to be useful in supplying immediate ends or desires, the 
 gratification of revenge being one of them. But if there 
 is anything plain in the lessons of history and of political 
 
 would but what it must, is it not the case that the care provided by the 
 parent, making exertion on the part of the infant unnecessary, accounts 
 for the infant's helplessness ? At least the period of infancy continues to 
 lengthen not as a necessary consequence of civilization or altruism, but 
 because parental solicitude takes away more and more the incentives 
 for effort. We begin to see now what could not be found in primitive 
 man, great numbers of people in whom infancy never ends at all. If, 
 as Professor Drummond argues, the claw of the hermit crab furnishes a 
 case of degradation because of the disuse of that member, which is no 
 longer a necessity, his house furnishing the necessary protection, will 
 not the same thing explain the lengthening period of infancy ?
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 91 
 
 economy, it is the wastefulness of war. It produces 
 absolutely nothing for the use of mankind, though pro- 
 lific enough in devices for still greater waste and destruc- 
 tion. The distribution in the form of plunder of that 
 which exists is accomplished at great disadvantage and 
 loss. Add to this the wanton destruction of life and 
 property, and it should be clear to the dullest that the 
 elimination of such an agency would be, from a strictly 
 utilitarian standpoint, of the utmost importance to the 
 world, somewhat answering to but greatly exceeding that 
 of the substitution of money and credit for rude barter in 
 commerce. It may well be doubted whether the most 
 successful war in modern times was profitable for the 
 victors. What has it been to the vanquished ? It would 
 seem that the intelligence of man ought to be able 
 to find a means of ridding him of this enormous and 
 unnecessary burden. 
 
 The moral aspects of the case have been so much dis- 
 cussed and are so well understood that I shall not here 
 consider them. Wars will cease, I believe, only when 
 men come to realize that they do not pay. It may be 
 well, however, to notice that since the successful exploita- 
 tion of nature requires the combined efforts of mankind, 
 and since such a combination, resting on confidence, is 
 dependent on the moral development of the race, then 
 from a purely material point of view the greatest disas- 
 ter is not the destruction of life and property, but the 
 degradation of the moral status. Morally and, I believe, 
 mentally war is a complete reversal of progress and a 
 straight return toward the abysm from which life has 
 emerged.
 
 92 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 A few lesser considerations in this connection should 
 receive brief attention. Man, it is urged, with all his 
 great advance, remains a fighting animal. Forcible 
 resistance to any encroachment upon his rights is as 
 instinctive as ever. The gaudumi certaminis is deeply 
 imbedded in his nature. To take away the occasion for 
 that supreme effort found only in battle would be to 
 destroy the principle of the survival of the fittest, and 
 would lead to physical degeneration. This has already 
 been considered in part. It is perhaps sufficient to add 
 that it is largely a mistake in fact. The instinct to fight 
 is by no means as vigorous as with primitive man. So 
 far as it exists, it is a survival. Neither ape nor tiger has 
 been eliminated from man, but they are slowly dying. 
 The physical development of man is no longer a first 
 consideration. Mr. Fiske has noted the change of direc- 
 tion in human development. From the mere animal 
 standpoint, the joy of fight is well enough for the victor; 
 but what is it to the vanquished } To the windrows of 
 dead or mangled men, shot through with bullets, torn 
 by shells, hacked with swords, trampled with hoofs, dis- 
 membered, disemboweled, joy of any sort has ceased to 
 be even a memory. 
 
 Finally, as to the argument from the order of nature, 
 it must be said that it is inapplicable, for the reason that 
 civilized man is no longer in that order. Physically he is 
 of course at the head of it ; but he constitutes a genus 
 of his own. As a member of society he is living almost 
 entirely under artificial conditions. He cannot escape 
 his physical nature, to be sure, without ceasing to live ; 
 but he has modified it in many ways, bringing it into
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 
 
 93 
 
 subjection to ideals of right rather than to the promptings 
 of inherited appetites. It matters not that the new con- 
 ditions are self-imposed. They exist and control men 
 just as truly, if not as extensively, as the purely natural 
 conditions. 
 
 r~Another argument gravely put forth is of much /^ 
 greater importance seemingly than in fact. All gov- 
 ernment, WQ are told, is in the last analysis based upon 
 physical force. Law has no self-executing power, and 
 wherever it is disregarded or is inadequate to pre- 
 serve order the military force must be called in. The 
 entire physical strength and control of a community 
 may thus be required to suppress revolt against the law 
 of the land. Wrongdoing is and ought to be punished 
 by force, pain, or death inflicted upon the body, or con- 
 finement and detention against the will. Children and 
 dependents are restrained and punished. Communities, 
 therefore, that show themselves criminal or hostile to 
 the whole order of civilization should be annihilated or 
 controlled by the more advanced nations. Those who 
 are incapable of managing their own affairs must, in 
 their own interest, be brought into subjection to nations 
 that know how to govern them. The highly civilized 
 nations thus enact the role of the schoolmaster or 
 policeman^ 
 
 Here, again, the question turns largely upon the con- 
 sideration of data already given. The fact is that the 
 assumption is a fundamental misconception. It has been 
 much too readily conceded by those who deprecate the 
 inferences drawn from it. If anything is clear from the 
 preceding discussion, it is that in governments, as well as
 
 94 THE ETHICS Of^ FORCE 
 
 in individual life, physical force has constantly tended to 
 disappear, being transmuted into moral force, law, cus- 
 tom, habit, precedent. From sheer compulsion, govern- 
 ment more and more rests upon consent and community 
 of interest. A conquered nation or community, ruled by 
 a military force, would not rest upon the consent of the 
 governed, but it would be very far removed from a, gov- 
 ernment of pure force. That profound modification 
 which has come from inheritance and training, both on 
 the part of conqueror and conquered, is an immense fac- 
 tor in the actual rule. Since the time of primitive man, 
 and even in the rudimentary government of animal com- 
 munities, the basis is not purely physical. An element 
 of physical force, it is true, remains in all governments, 
 much greater in some than in others, but in all govern- 
 ments it is diminishing. It may be said that among 
 certain criminals fear is the only motive which can or 
 does restrain from crime. Even this cannot be conceded 
 without qualification. Among the most hardened some 
 habits of obedience to authority remain, and if there is 
 not much respect for the rights of property, there is, 
 except among a small minority, considerable respect for 
 life. At the very worst, they have a certain loyalty to 
 their fellow criminals, and some organization and com- 
 munity of interest. They could not carry on their nefa- 
 rious business without it. This may be unfortunate for 
 society, but it none the less defeats the proposition in 
 controversy. With reference to its own class, it presents 
 some analogy to the association of wild dogs or jackals 
 for the purpose of plunder, which is nevertheless a 
 remove from the old basis of absolute physical force,
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 95 
 
 and a step higher in the mental scale. With reference 
 to society, it presents rather the aspect of two commu- 
 nities imperfectly assimilated and in partial, not total, 
 antagonism to each other. 
 
 The theory carries with it the assumption that to the 
 support of any law the entire force of the community 
 may be brought. The person or persons who administer 
 the government are like the engineer who by pulling a 
 lever may apply to the turning of his wheels the entire 
 expansive force of the steam which can be generated 
 from the water in his boiler through the potential energy 
 of the coal in the tender. As a fact, nothing of the sort 
 can be done. But if all the energy of a nation could 
 be, as it were, gathered into a single hand, upon what 
 domestic concern could it be expended ? The very prop- 
 osition is contradictory. If a part of the community is 
 in revolt against the law, the entire power of the com- 
 munity is not united, nor can it be used by any central 
 authority. If the opposition amounted to a large minor- 
 ity, it would be civil war. If exactly divided, a condition 
 never realized in actual practice, then the expenditure of 
 the entire physical force of the community would be to 
 annihilate the entire community. 
 
 Further, it should be observed that whatever portion 
 of the force of the community a government can bring 
 to bear upon an opposing or rebellious faction, it must 
 wield it through mental and moral agencies. These 
 agencies, it will be conceded, must consent to its em- 
 ployment. Now, while "the king (the government) can 
 do no wrong," his ministers can. The most absolute 
 of monarchs has sometimes run counter to the moral
 
 96 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 sentiment of the community over which he rules, — and 
 has at once found the physical force divided, and the 
 v^eightier portion arrayed against himself. In this 
 country the fugitive slave lau^ is a good case in point. 
 It was as truly a law, duly and legally enacted, as any 
 ever placed upon the statute books. Was there ever a 
 time when more than a small fraction of the physical 
 force of the nation could have been invoked in its sup- 
 port ? Governments, therefore, derive not only their just 
 powers, in the language of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, but all their powers, from the consent of the 
 governed. Consent is not approval. In most cases it 
 is given blindly, with no clear perception of what is 
 involved. Some citizens strongly disapprove the policy 
 of their government as to some things, while approving 
 it in its general features. But even if the disapproval 
 were very emphatic, and extended to most things, they 
 might still consent. This is always the case as long as 
 they use only such means of influence to change an act 
 or policy as the structure of the government itself pro- 
 vides, — failing in which they acquiesce. On a purely 
 physical basis they must needs use in opposition their 
 physical force, however inadequate to the extremity. 
 When a man or body of men submits instead of fighting 
 to the death, it is a misuse of words to say that they 
 have yielded to physical force. They have acted under 
 the dominion of ideas of wisdom and prudence, which 
 are moral ideas born, it may be, of experience. And if 
 they, then the other constituent factors, are living under 
 the control of ideas, and the government does not rest 
 on a basis of physical force. In arriving at a modus
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 97 
 
 vivendi, men yield something which they would prefer 
 to keep, yet they consent to the burdens and restric- 
 tions, not because they enjoy or even approve them for 
 themselves, but because they are less unpleasant than 
 those they must endure but for the status which the 
 law gives them. The worst government ever instituted 
 among men is better than a condition of pure anarchy, 
 though it may well be questioned whether there ever 
 was such a condition among men. We may, therefore, 
 strenuously object to a particular law, custom, or policy. 
 It may be unfavorable to our individual interests, or 
 even repugnant to our moral sense, and yet we should 
 feel that a resort to physical force, even if successful, 
 would be disastrous. Governments, though of man's own 
 making, are a part of the fixed or slowly changing 
 conditions under which he lives. Man's effort has been 
 and always must be to adapt himself to the moral, intel- 
 lectual, and social, as well as to the material conditions in 
 which he is placed. For better or for worse, his world 
 will slowly change; but he will change in and with it. 
 He can no more turn back his ideas and habits than 
 he can turn his physical structure back into that of his 
 simian ancestor. That would be to annihilate not merely 
 the progress of the past, but the roadway over which 
 it came. We submit, then, to burdens which we be- 
 lieve to be unnecessary or unjust, rather than be thrown 
 back on the old antagonism and endless and uncompro- 
 mising conflicts. We follow, let me repeat once more 
 the formula, the lines of least resistance. In doing this, 
 the altruistic sentiment develops as we have seen. 
 Finally we come to take a vicarious pride in the common
 
 98 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 progress and attainment, quite aside from a question of 
 personal advantage. The appreciation of the utility of 
 government is, in time, transmuted into a habit of rever- 
 ence for law and custom, as fixed as religion and not a 
 whit more based upon physical force. 
 
 It must not be inferred that I hold a government to 
 be desirable or just which disregards the approval of its 
 citizens or the preponderance of intelligent and delib- 
 erate choice of the governed. I am merely looking to 
 the sanctions of government, the basis upon which it 
 rests. It would be just as true to say that family gov- 
 ernment rests on a physical basis. There was a time 
 when the father might take the life of his child, or the 
 owner of his slave. In England, until a recent date, it 
 was the right of a man to beat his wife with a stick not 
 thicker than his thumb; she was fortunate whose hus- 
 band's hands were slender and delicate. Within a gen- 
 eration the most cruel punishments have been authorized 
 and employed in schools, the teacher, or master as he 
 was called, standing in loco parentis. In England, up to 
 a very recent date, the most trivial offenses were pun- 
 ishable by death. In Elizabeth's time the authorities 
 captured a hundred beggars at once, — men indeed who 
 did not hesitate at violence when necessary in their trade, 
 — hung fifty of them at one time, and only regretted 
 that, from the nature of the offenses, some technical 
 grounds compelled them to await the next assize before 
 hanging the rest. Yet Elizabeth's reign was a prolonged 
 effort to avoid war, not, to be sure, so much from 
 humanitarian as from economic reasons. It was the most 
 fruitful period, too, in English history, not only in moral 
 and intellectual but also in industrial development.
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 99 
 
 The plain fact is that both in municipal and in family 
 government physical force is more and more giving way 
 to the control of ideas. Even in the treatment of crimi- 
 nals, once regarded as outcasts to whom the public owed 
 no duty, there has been an immense infusion of moral 
 force, to the greatest advantage both of the criminal and 
 the public. Some remnants of physical force are destined 
 to remain for a long time, perhaps always, in the treat- 
 ment of the untaught and inexperienced; but it is now 
 evident that, whatever the moral deficiency, wrongdoing 
 of all sorts is mainly through lack of perspective. Its cure 
 is a wider intelligence. 
 
 What should we do, however, if the moral forces broke 
 down, leaving the government without support.? Noth- 
 ing. There would be nothing to do, and no one to do it. 
 What should we do if the earth fell into the sun ? . 
 
 (Again we are confidently told that war brings about -^^ 
 conditions which insure prolonged peace. On its face 
 this seems something like a bull, but it is gravely urged. 
 It may be that when one nation has completely crushed 
 another a permanent peace between the two is secured. 
 It is the case of the lamb lying down inside of the 
 lion. History does not, however, offer much encourage- 
 ment for a long continuance of even this sort of peace. 
 Nations are not, in modern times, wholly destroyed by 
 war. The rapid recuperation of a nation apparently com- 
 pletely exhausted, the ever-renewed conflict with its 
 neighbor, now defeated and now victorious, is the spec- 
 tacle held out to our view. Assuming that two nations 
 must fight sometime, a war this year may prevent a war 
 ten years hence, more destructive because entered upon 
 with greater preparation and resources on both sides.
 
 lOO THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 The nation now the stronger or better prepared will 
 attack at once instead of waiting for its enemy fully to 
 develop its destructive agencies. But let us not here con- 
 fuse two entirely different considerations. The strong 
 nation will force the fighting because of its reliance upon 
 its greater physical force. The weaker one will yield long 
 before its powers are exhausted, from the conviction that 
 it must yield at last. It acts upon intellectual and moral 
 considerations, therefore, at least in part, and uses its 
 purely physical forces only far enough to satisfy what it 
 calls its "honor." Nothing is settled by the appeal to 
 arms except the question which of the parties is the 
 stronger at the time. The vanquished nation does not 
 change its opinion as to the rights of the controversy, 
 and if the time should come when it is strong enough 
 successfully to recover its losses or enforce its demands 
 it has no hesitation in doing so. Nations never stand 
 still, but grow or decline from causes within themselves. 
 No nation has ever for a very long period maintained its 
 physical superiority to its neighbors. Somewhere in its 
 history the balance changes, and that nation which has 
 cowed and bullied other nations, harried their coasts, 
 razed their cities, destroyed their warriors, and dashed 
 the heads of children against the wall falls itself into 
 decadence and becomes in turn the prey to all the evils 
 it has inflicted in the day of its pride. No, it is a 
 strange delusion'-tt% suppose that peace can be insured 
 through fighting. ^ 
 
 There is one way in which it might seem that all the 
 physical force of the world could be united and so find no 
 further use for itself in war. If some powerful nation
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON lOI 
 
 could conquer and absorb its neighbors one by one, such 
 a result might follow ; and we may conceive conditions 
 under which this might be desirable. Such conditions 
 do not now exist, and there is no certainty that they 
 ever will. A single government for the whole world, if 
 once established, could not long be maintained, as evi- 
 dently it would not subserve a useful purpose. It would 
 be impossible that all municipal government should be 
 administered from a single source. The diverse condi- 
 tions in different parts of the earth compel different 
 manners, customs, and laws. To bring all races and 
 peoples into a uniform system is as hopeless as to try 
 to bring into uniformity all differences of climate and 
 soil. But no nation could long pursue this process of 
 assimilation, however benevolent it may seem. The one 
 which is being swallowed will never look at it in that 
 light. If it does not go to pieces from internal causes, 
 there will soon be a combination of other strong nations 
 against it. These will persist in attributing all its self- 
 sacrificing zeal for the good of the world to plain greed. 
 " I came for your good," cried one of the Norman kings 
 upon landing upon English soil; and, less skillful in 
 the use of the language than in arms, he added, "I 
 came for all your goods." And thus it will ever be 
 regarded. But combinations can never be relied on to 
 preserve permanent peace, for the reason that the parties 
 to the combination have their controversies with each 
 other, according to their several interests. They get rid 
 of no antagonisms by mere combination, but strive so to 
 balance force against force that both or all nations shall 
 be unable to act. The relative weight of the groups.
 
 I02 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 however, cannot be maintained, for reasons heretofore 
 stated. It is impossible for a nation exactly to gauge 
 its own strength or that of its adversary. To ascertain 
 whether there is a balance, resort must be had to that 
 contest which it is the object of the balance to prevent. 
 It is conceded that the European concert has sometimes 
 delayed or prevented wars. It has made every nation 
 cautious about entering upon a course which would 
 involve such horrible consequences. All Europe might 
 now be drawn into collision, and with the dreadful de- 
 structiveness of modern appliances the bloodshed would 
 be appalling, even to such as delight in the glory of 
 slaughter. The operation of the concert is, therefore, 
 moral rather than physical. A true balance of power is 
 obviously no more possible than a perfect equilibrium 
 of the physical forces of the universe. It must be con- 
 stantly adjusted. The attempt of a nation to make such 
 additions to its armament year by year as will insure its 
 superiority to any combination which may be formed 
 against it is equally futile. There is a point beyond 
 which the strain cannot be endured. It is impossible to 
 tell in advance what force it may be called upon to meet. 
 Almost every nation of Europe has, at some period of 
 its history, been now in alliance, and again at war, with 
 every other. 
 
 \ To use force to prevent force, or so to array or dis- 
 tribute it as to make it inoperative, would seem to be 
 hopeless. The alternative is to dispense with it as a 
 means of settling national disputes altogether. So long 
 as force is recognized as a proper means of gaining its 
 ends, a nation with a great standing army, equipped with
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 103 
 
 the most approved devices for slaughter, will resort to it 
 as against a weaker nation or one it deems such. But if 
 six months or a year were necessary for getting ready 
 to fight, the hot blood would have a chance to cool, and 
 reason and moderation on both sides would find means 
 of just and honorable accommodation. There is not the 
 slightest question that the carrying of arms by private 
 citizens leads to very numerous breaches of the peace 
 and homicides, contrary both to the law and public sen- 
 timent. How much more does the carrying of arms by 
 nations lead to collisions, not forbidden by international 
 law, and applauded by the clergy ! It is not for me to 
 show that disarmament is practicable. If impracticable, 
 it is not because it would not subserve a vast utility, but 
 from causes that lie outside of reason. One nation may 
 suspect that the others will not act in good faith, but 
 will secretly retain some part of their armament or the 
 means for its speedy rehabilitation. This means that 
 nations cannot trust to or act upon those pledges and 
 assurances which are relied on between individuals. It 
 means not that their fear and distrust are reasonable, 
 but that these survive in international relations long 
 after the necessities out of which they grew have disap- 
 peared. Another reason, possibly more potent, is found 
 in the sentiment of honor, so called, which we have 
 already noticed. All the considerations which favor this 
 sentiment can be urged just as favorably with reference 
 to individual honor. A century ago the duel was in 
 almost universal favor as a means of settling disputes 
 where "honor" was involved, and this could be imported 
 into almost any dispute. But the duel has nearly
 
 I04 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 disappeared among the English-speaking peoples, and 
 is coming into disfavor elsewhere. In Germany it is 
 defended not on moral grounds, nor yet as a desirable 
 means of settling civil controversies, but as aiding to 
 keep up the morale of the army. The army officer must 
 not be moved by the considerations which prevail among 
 good citizens, but by the conventions of a military code. 
 This goes so far that a year or two ago an officer who was 
 jostled on a sidewalk drew his sword and killed a peace- 
 able citizen, and was commended for the act. Yet, apart 
 from some such brutalities, kept alive in the interest of 
 "honor," it can hardly be said that Germans are less 
 humane than Americans or Englishmen. Their " honor " 
 is somewhat more virulent and pestiferous.^ 
 
 Six hundred years before Christ, Buddha laid down 
 the rule which forever excludes the employment of phys- 
 ical force for the settlement of disputes. The prop- 
 osition appears again and again, and in one place is 
 illustrated by a sort of parable. King Brahmadatta had 
 made war on a weaker king, driven him from his king- 
 dom, and appropriated it. The exiled king, after many 
 wanderings, settles down in disguise in a potter's dwell- 
 ing, just outside of Benares. He lives a peaceable and 
 harmless life, educates his son, but many years after- 
 wards is discovered by Brahmadatta, who puts him to 
 death, together with his queen. On his way to execu- 
 tion he sees his son, who has returned for a visit, and 
 
 1 At a recent General Synod of the State Church of Prussia, a reso- 
 lution was introduced condemning dueling as " sinful." Although it 
 was carried, it was opposed by a large minority, both lay and clerical. As 
 usual, it was sought to justify the practice on the authority of the Old 
 Testament.
 
 ON GROUNDS OF REASON 105 
 
 manages, without betraying his relationship, to give him 
 an important piece of advice. The son afterwards 
 obtains, in disguise, service under Brahmadatta, who 
 presently becomes very fond of him. While hunting 
 one day the king became separated from his retinue, 
 save this young man, and worn out with fatigue he lay 
 down and slept with his head in his lap. Then the young 
 man thought : " This king Brahmadatta has done us 
 great injury ; he robbed us of our kingdom and slew my 
 father and my mother ; he is now in my power." Think- 
 ing thus, he unsheathed his sword. The king awakes in 
 fright, for he has had a dream, which often haunts him, 
 that the son of the murdered king will slay him. He 
 relates his dream ; and the youth lays his left hand upon 
 the king's head, and with the right draws his sword, with 
 these startUng words : " I am Dirghayu, the son of 
 Dirgheti, whom you have robbed of his kingdom and 
 slain, with his wife, my mother. The time of revenge 
 has come." If there ever was a case where revenge is 
 proper, this would seem to be one. The king begs for 
 his life, to which Dirghayu replies, without any bitter- 
 ness : " How can I grant you your life, O King, since 
 my life is endangered by you ? It is you, O King, who 
 must grant me my life." In the end, each grants the 
 other life, and, clasping hands, they swear not to harm 
 each other. The young man now explains his father's 
 last words, those which more especially concern us being 
 these : " Not by hatred is hatred appeased ; hatred is 
 appeased by not-hatred." It means : " You have killed 
 my father and mother, O King. If I should deprive you 
 of life, then your partisans would deprive me of life. My
 
 Io6 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 partisans again would deprive those of life. Thus by 
 hatred hatred would not be appeased. But now, O King, 
 you have granted me my life, and I have granted you 
 your life ; thus by not-hatred hatred has been appeased." 
 The same lesson reappears in the Laureate's verse, 
 said to be founded on an Irish legend. A chieftain sails 
 with his clan to revenge the death of his father ; but as 
 they come to the island of his enemy they are blown 
 away across seas, and come one after another to marvel, 
 ous islands and meet with wondrous adventures, and 
 after fighting among themselves a little remnant come 
 to the isle of a saint, who urges the chief to give up 
 the strife. 
 
 His fathers have slain thy fathers, in war or in single strife ; 
 Thy fathers have slain his fathers, each taken a Hfe for a life ; 
 Thy father had slain his father ; how long shall the murder last.? 
 Go back to the isle of Finn, and suffer the Past to be Past. 
 
 He obeys, and on the return voyage they come to the 
 isle from which they had been blown ; 
 
 and there on the shore was he, — 
 The man who had slain my father ; I saw him and let him be.
 
 VI 
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS 
 
 But, it may be objected, conceding that war is irra- 
 tional, what is gained by demonstrating that fact ? Do 
 you suppose that men will stop fighting because it is 
 foolish ? Men may admit that anger is a brief madness, 
 but they will get angry just the same. Grant that this 
 all grows out of prejudice, shortsightedness, selfishness, 
 pig-headedness, what you will, nevertheless this is a part 
 of the limitation and environment of men, as much as 
 their education and knowledge. As a practical matter, 
 we have to take men as we find them. The time will 
 come when men will realize the folly of fighting ; but 
 that time is far in the future. Until some practical 
 means has been devised by which international differ- 
 ences can be settled justly and with honor to all parties, 
 war must continue. It is not wrong for men to do the 
 best they can. The Creator has not made men perfect, 
 and as yet they have not attained to a high degree of 
 wisdom. He has put into operation a principle of progress, 
 which will indeed in the end banish war ; but that happy 
 time may be ages, eons, in the future. Meantime, the 
 conditions v/hich lead to war are not of man's making, but 
 are prescribed by that Power which through a practical 
 eternity has brought him by slow gradations up from the 
 formless protoplasm to his present capacities. So here you 
 have an objection based on good evolutionary grounds. 
 
 107
 
 I08 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 Very good. If war really originates not in the will of 
 man but in the conditions imposed upon him from with- 
 out, it is idle to argue the question of right or utility. 
 It would be like discussing the moral aspects of the 
 tornado, the earthquake, or the great geological upheavals 
 and subsidences, making of a given area of the earth's 
 surface now land and now sea. If, from the standpoint 
 of Omniscience and regarding some far-off and vast 
 design working out on lines which the human intellect 
 cannot comprehend or even detect, there are utilities in 
 these, they are such as do not seem to relate to the 
 immediate interests of men or to the good of the indi- 
 vidual at all. We cannot regard them as initial move- 
 ments, originating in the immediate will of God, but as 
 consequences of inconceivably vast forces put into play 
 in the incredibly remote past, working out their results 
 in accordance with their own nature, with no direct rela- 
 tion to the welfare of man. Life has simply adapted 
 itself to or grown out of its conditions. Man takes 
 things as he finds them and does the best he can, some- 
 times surviving and sometimes perishing in this conflict 
 or play of forces. 
 
 If, indeed, we eliminate the human will from the ques- 
 tion, we need argue no farther on either side. This is to 
 dispose of the contention by eliminating its subject-mat- 
 ter, life being purely irresponsible and automatic. There 
 can be neither utility nor right in action that is a matter 
 of sheer necessity or mechanics. Thus, indeed, we may 
 saddle the responsibility for war on the Author of the 
 universe. It hardly need be pointed out that the same 
 consideration would eliminate all responsibility from
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS 109 
 
 individual human action. Law is based upon the assump- 
 tion that the will controls the individual action, and 
 when a case arises in which the will has not been exer- 
 cised, as in an accident or where the person is incapa- 
 ble of reason and so of exercising discrimination, such 
 a person is not held responsible for the consequence of 
 his acts. I shall direct my argument only to such as 
 believe that the will of man is as certainly in control of 
 the movements leading to and directing wars as in any 
 of the activities of life ; that nations go to war because 
 they want to, influenced by definite motives, from sup- 
 posed advantage, or to gratify some feeling of animosity ; 
 that national quarrels come about exactly like individual 
 quarrels, but, as I shall show, are far more controllable, 
 certain prejudices aside, than the latter. It is not true 
 that some unseen and irresistible power places nations in 
 positions from which there is no escape save through the 
 chances of battle, — which is, in another form, the propo- 
 sition that war is a part of the order of nature. 
 
 I am under no constraint to prove that war will cease 
 because it ought to. I believe it will, and that this may 
 be much nearer at hand than the most hopeful have 
 imagined. I believe that if a single generation could 
 pass without war, the international court already pro- 
 vided by the Conference at The Hague having come in 
 the meantime to be recognized as an actual fact, future 
 wars between civilized nations would be impossible. As 
 I write, however, there is nothing to indicate any such 
 cheerful prospect, but rather the threat of more tre- 
 mendous and appalling wars than the world has yet seen, 
 the awful destructiveness of which may make men turn
 
 no THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 to rational methods of settling future controversies. 
 What I am held to show by my thesis is that war is 
 irrational. I shall not argue that it is wrong. In the 
 abstract this is almost everywhere admitted ; but as 
 the moral sentiment of a country exercises in times of 
 passion no controlling force, this admission has no prac- 
 tical bearing. The moral loss to a community in the 
 lowering of the whole tone of society, the blurring of 
 the moral perceptions, the deadening of conscience, the 
 disregard of the recognized distinctions between right 
 and wrong, I shall pass over. They have been suffi- 
 ciently emphasized by moralists already. What I desire, 
 but can hope to do but slightly, is to convince men that 
 war is unprofitable, a clumsy agency, which no longer 
 serves a useful purpose and in the evolution of the race 
 ought no longer to survive. If men ever become fully 
 convinced that their interests are all subserved by peace, 
 that they have nothing to gain by war but everything to 
 lose, then war will cease. 
 
 On some points I shall agree with my adversary 
 quickly. Prejudice, passion, self-interest are a part of 
 the limitation of men, and must be taken into the 
 account. It is not to be supposed that there will ever 
 come a time when they will not exist, and indeed this 
 might not be wholly desirable. Passion and self-interest, 
 if not selfishness, are among the dynamics of life. They 
 are the basis of motive and action. What men might be 
 without them I do not know. Prejudice is merely the 
 inclination to do the thing we have done and with which 
 we are acquainted, the preference for the known over 
 the unknown, which must always be a necessity in a life
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS III 
 
 of progress. It is often very exasperating to those who 
 have passed beyond the phase of knowledge and experi- 
 ence in which it originated. It is often a serious check 
 to progress, always acting as a brake, but it is also gen- 
 erally a safety-brake. As the race advances, the preju- 
 dices of to-day will disappear, but others will take their 
 place and subserve the same uses and become the same 
 hindrances with regard to still greater advances in the 
 more distant future. Can we then hope for a time when 
 misunderstandings and disputes will not arise.'' By no 
 means. But when prejudice and self-interest shall urge 
 the preservation of peace, the motives which now lead 
 straight to war will be the forces to prevent it. 
 
 We must not expect men to act in advance of their 
 knowledge. They cannot apply a principle before it is 
 discovered. Liquefied air may perhaps in the future 
 work an industrial revolution, but it is not irrational for 
 men now to employ steam and electricity ; but knowing 
 these, if they were to return to the ox-cart for the 
 transportation of goods and passengers, they would be 
 irrational. Yet the latter means once represented an 
 enormous advance over the time when man knew no 
 other means of locomotion than his own legs, and 
 when he carried his scanty belongings on his bare back. 
 Rationality does not require that men do better than 
 they know how, but only as well as they know. Its test 
 is the employment of such means as man has to the 
 accomplishment of useful ends. Men differ immensely 
 in knowledge and capacity, but the sav^age and the weak- 
 ling are still rational. Nations differ in the degree of 
 their civilization and ability to supply their wants through
 
 112 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 industry, but even in the most barbarous a high degree 
 of rationality exists. 
 
 War is irrational not merely because it is wrong or cruel 
 or a clumsy, uneconomical, and inept agency for settling 
 differences, but because men knowing a better method 
 still resort to it. Nay, they have actually employed the 
 better in numberless cases, with an enormous saving of 
 life and property. They see perfectly the desirability of 
 employing it in all cases, and yet they do not do it. All 
 men of course have not seen this, and it is not necessary 
 to its employment that they should. Not all understand 
 the steam engine and telephone. The nations are elect- 
 ing in this matter to use the ox-cart, for some occasions, 
 when they might employ the railroad train. Imagine the 
 cost of an international court to reach the extravagant 
 sum of a million dollars a year ; this would perhaps be 
 one tenth of one per cent of the cost of the armaments 
 made necessary under existing conditions. What, then, 
 hinders its adoption for the settlement of all international 
 questions ? Self-interest should be the most powerful 
 factor in its favor. Prejudice there may be, and distrust ; 
 yet we have seen how little these interfere with the 
 peaceful conduct of commercial life, and how rapidly in 
 fact they are disappearing. Honesty has come to be 
 recognized as one of the most important factors in any 
 large and permanent success. The intercourse of nations 
 as such is less ingenuous than that between individuals 
 of these nations; but there has been a great change 
 within the last century. Diplomacy does not display its 
 hand, but it does not carry, like Ah Sin, twenty-four 
 packs of cards up its sleeves. A large amount of candor
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS I13 
 
 now enters into it, and a large confidence is reposed in 
 the pledge of a nation through its accredited agent. A 
 few generations back statecraft was the embodiment of 
 skillful lying, treachery, and deceit. Engagements were 
 entered upon for the mere purpose of disarming suspi- 
 cion, without the slightest intention of fulfillment. An 
 alliance with one power would be made, and at the same 
 moment an engagement entered into with a second, bind- 
 ing the nation to make war on the first. Its whole object 
 was to conceal the intended move, so as to catch the 
 other party off guard. 
 
 Now at the Peace Conference it was conceded gener- 
 ally that commercial and industrial questions could be 
 profitably settled in an international court, but it was 
 urged by many that there were questions of honor of 
 which a nation must be its own judge. This is unques- 
 tionably the sore spot. Where it is a matter of interest 
 only, a strong nation might gladly yield a valid right 
 rather than contest it in war at a cost exceeding the 
 value of the right. If " honor " is at stake, a weak nation, 
 with the certainty of defeat, must fight. What then is a 
 nation's honor, differing from that of a man, which it can- 
 not intrust to the keeping of unprejudiced and disinter- 
 ested judges, partly of its own choosing ? We must go back 
 once more to the life of individuals for our analogue. 
 
 Two boys, comrades and friends, fairly generous and 
 just according to the standard of boys, differ in some 
 trifling matter. They become excited and indulge in some 
 warmth of expression, but as yet with no really hostile 
 feeling. There is no ground for a quarrel, and left to 
 themselves, a friendly composition would usually result.
 
 114 '^^E ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 The other boys know nothing and care nothing as to the 
 merits of the controversy, but they dearly love a " scrap," 
 for which there is a flattering prospect. " Fight, fight, 
 form a ring ! " is the cry as they gather about. Even 
 now if there is a great disparity of strength and size, the 
 one clearly superior may disappoint the spectators by 
 declining to " thrash " the weaker, though the difficulties 
 have been greatly increased. Finally, some one places 
 a chip on the shoulder of one of the principals, and a 
 settlement without blows becomes well-nigh impossible. 
 Honor is at stake. One is dedicated to the defense of 
 the chip, the other to the high emprise of knocking it 
 off. To refuse to do what the code calls for is cowardice. 
 The desired entertainment is not often long delayed. 
 Next day the boys are as friendly as ever. With men 
 the causes of difference are not quite the same, but they 
 are frequently as trivial. Certain forms of expression are 
 insults which must be wiped out in blood. Happily the 
 courts give much opportunity for peaceful and vicarious 
 abuse, and the bad blood is mostly worked off without 
 the actual shedding of any, through attorneys paid for 
 the purpose. Enlightened legislation has also attached 
 such inconvenient incidents to the old method of wiping 
 out insults that it has almost entirely disappeared, or 
 goes no farther than an interchange of fisticuffs. No 
 matter how angry a man may be, he is very apt to keep 
 himself within the law, or at farthest so as to incur only 
 such penalties — say small fines — as he can meet with 
 little inconvenience, and which he considers only a fair 
 equivalent for the satisfaction of beating his neighbor. 
 His anger, in other words, if a brief madness, is not total
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS I 15 
 
 dementia, which latter, if shown, is a sufficient excuse in 
 law for his acts. Unfortunately no means have yet been 
 devised for laying similar restraints upon the temper of 
 a nation, though there is no doubt that public sentiment 
 everywhere now offers some restraint. If to this an 
 actual penalty could attach, there is no reason to doubt 
 that it would prove even more effectual for the preserva- 
 tion of peace between the nations than is the municipal 
 law between individuals. For while perhaps a nation 
 may become insane as well as an individual, its mania 
 is never so complete. There is nearly always a large 
 minority which does not share in the anger and does not 
 lose its wits. This minority knows that it is likely to 
 have to pay for the excesses of the majority, and seeks 
 to keep it within the bounds of reason. The city of 
 Pittsburg, some years back, was compelled to pay a 
 large sum in damages for the act of a mob of strikers. 
 Probably only a small per cent of the community was 
 stark mad, and a still smaller proportion actually parti- 
 cipated in the destruction of property. 
 
 But in what does the honor of a man in fact con- 
 sist .-• Is it not in the living an honorable and upright 
 life, in which his conduct is based on pure motives, 
 justice, equity, fairness, reverence for the good, and 
 hatred of meanness of every sort ? Is it not the denial of 
 these qualities that he mainly resents .'' How, then, is his 
 honor assailed by some offensive epithet which a vulgar 
 ruffian may throw at him .-* And how does a nation's 
 honor differ from that of the citizen ? In one respect 
 the occasions for national offense are fewer than with 
 individuals. Tempted by cupidity, one may make an
 
 Il6 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 unjust demand upon another; but it rarely goes out- 
 side of the most studiously polite and courteous forms. 
 Insults to flags, acts of aggression upon the rights of 
 citizens, or violence to their persons, are by individuals, 
 and rarely the act of a nation until a state of war actu- 
 ally exists. Now, every state is bound to repress the 
 lawlessness of its citizens. It is also obliged to protect 
 their rights. But if the one can secure the rights of its 
 citizens, if the other can determine upon evidence in an 
 impartial court the facts in dispute, in what conceivable 
 way is the honor of either impugned by resorting to this 
 court of reason rather than to the chance of war ? Is it 
 possible that it has vindicated its honor when, being the 
 stronger, it has invaded the territory of its neighbor and 
 subjected its population to indiscriminate outrage, pil- 
 lage, hardship, and suffering, destroying the lives and 
 property of those who not only had nothing to do with 
 the insult upon which the question of honor hangs but 
 also may have as heartily disapproved and repudiated it 
 as the force thus turned upon them ? If a man call me 
 a coward, shall I prove my courage by beating his wife 
 and children, who may have disapproved or apologized 
 for his rudeness } A nation's honor, then, is not at stake, 
 or rarely so. What we find is the spirit of bravado which 
 refuses to let a chip be knocked from the shoulder. The 
 nation must not "back down," or ''haul down its flag," 
 however wantonly or wrongly raised. To do so is " to 
 show the white feather." Wrong a nation may endure, 
 but it cannot allow another to imagine that it is afraid. 
 It is the old, archaic, irrational courage which we have 
 seen among the lower orders, surviving long after its
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS II7 
 
 usefulness has .passed away ; the false and foolish pride 
 in that which is not a subject for pride at all, a sullen, 
 dogged persistence in a course after it is evident that it 
 is neither just nor wise. To the false courage we must 
 add the false patriotism, unmeaning, truculent, sangui- 
 nary, without use or reason. These will explain a great 
 proportion of the wars which have ravaged the earth 
 since human society began. 
 
 But while these primitive conceptions survive and are 
 all powerful with the masses of men, it is yet true that 
 war in the abstract is not approved even by these. In 
 this country we found nearly universal disapproval of 
 the South African War, one half of our people bitter 
 against Great Britain as the selfish and wanton aggres- 
 sor, and the other as strongly opposed to the Boers and 
 blaming Kruger for actually beginning the war, whatever 
 the rights in controversy, under the belief that tempora- 
 rily he had the advantage and could crush the British 
 troops before reenforcements could reach them. Few 
 thought that the war should have taken place. We 
 boiled with indignation that Spain should seek to hold a 
 colony which had belonged to it for centuries, but saw 
 no impropriety in -ourselves acquiring a colony by force 
 of arms, and subjugating its resisting people with awful 
 slaughter. The simple fact is that the public sentiment, 
 which is very generally right when uninfluenced by 
 prejudice or self-interest, is absolutely untrustworthy in 
 times of excitement and in matters where it is a party. 
 In another generation it may bring itself to the point 
 of view where it sees the past as others saw it when it 
 was the present, but temporarily it has lost its reasoning
 
 Il8 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 faculty, or is the subject of insane delusions. That the 
 moral processes are inverted during a period of war has 
 long been recognized, but that this is equally the case with 
 the mental has not been sufficiently pointed out. That 
 it would be so we ought indeed to expect, since the mind 
 cannot be set off into compartments acting independently 
 of each other, but is one and indivisible. Nevertheless 
 we have somehow thought that men can be demoralized 
 and still retain their mental powers intact. It would be 
 as sensible to suppose that one could have heart disease 
 without its affecting any other part of his body. A little 
 calm study of the utterances of some of our best journ- 
 als, ablest ministers, and most conscientious and clear- 
 headed public men before the beginning of our late war 
 with Spain and after it had begun will reveal such incon- 
 sistencies and contradictions as admit of no other expla- 
 nation, unless we say that these men are hypocrites and 
 mere shufflers, which I for one do not believe. It has 
 long been recognized that the ablest historians are not to 
 be trusted when dealing with a war in which their own 
 country has had part. For a like but still more potent 
 reason we are always reminded at the close of a war that 
 the time has not come to write its history. But surely, 
 so far as knowledge of the facts, sources of information, 
 motives, causes, and principles goes, that of all times would 
 seem to be the most favorable. It is, however, the fact 
 that veritable history cannot be written by any one 
 whose passions have been enlisted in it, until his mental 
 and moral balance have been regained. 
 
 The masses of men do not reason at all on the sub- 
 ject of war. They act as their remote ancestry in the
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS I 19 
 
 prehistoric past acted when the occasion presented itself. 
 It is a mere impulse growing out of prejudice. They 
 are not to be too severely blamed for it. This preju- 
 dice represents the stage of progress to which they have 
 attained, and it is idle to ask them to act upon consider- 
 ations which will actuate men in some future age. A 
 nation stands no more chance of acting on rational 
 grounds when the hot blood is up than does the individ- 
 ual under the same conditions. What then .? The indi- 
 vidual is born into a social status in which laws, customs, 
 and established tribunals intervene between him and his 
 crazy impulses. The burning c|uestions which arise 
 between him and his neighbor will not be settled 
 between the two, save by all the other neighbors acting 
 through the law. Philip sober confronts Philip drunk 
 and faces him down. It is not unusual for those who 
 are subject to violent and uncontrollable paroxysms of 
 rage and fury, forewarned of the approach of one, to 
 ask to be put under restraint. Ulysses, assured that his 
 reason would be no safeguard against the song of the 
 sirens, had himself lashed to the mast. It would seem 
 to be the part of wisdom for a nation, knowing these 
 things, while still in the possession of its faculties, to put 
 itself under bonds for its good behavior. If really con- 
 vinced that war no longer subserves the interests of the 
 race, but is the greatest hindrance in its conquest of 
 nature, the great and ever-increasing burden that weights 
 it down, it would seem easy when at peace, when their 
 honor — that ghastly specter which haunts their uneasy 
 dreams — is wholly satisfied and may even in appearance 
 be preserved, for the nations to enter into an agreement
 
 120 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 through which war would be no longer recognized as 
 a possible agency in the settlement of future disagree- 
 ments. They have, however, up to now, refused. It is 
 possible that they think this might put them to some 
 disadvantage ; but if we have correctly reasoned thus 
 far, war will always put them to a greater one, questions 
 of " honor " aside, than any which they could suffer in a 
 court or through arbitration. The real reason must be 
 that, while each nation recognizes war in general to be a 
 losing game whichever way it goes, it still thinks that in 
 some particular case which may arise it might reap a 
 profit or desirable end of some sort, a gain in territory, 
 in credit, or in satisfaction. The latter may accrue even 
 in case of a disastrous defeat. If honor is preserved, it 
 is enough. It is the case of a boy who has been knocked 
 down, choked, pommeled, bruised, and battered until his 
 mother hardly knows him, who while convalescing in 
 bed grimly consoles himself with the thought that he 
 scratched his antagonist's face. 
 
 But granting the possibility in a given instance of a 
 material gain by one of the combatants at the expense of 
 the other, it will be difHcult, in modern times at least, to 
 point to an actual instance of it. The most favorable 
 example which could be mentioned is doubtless that of 
 the English conquest of India ; and yet so good an 
 authority as Goldwin Smith and multitudes besides 
 doubt whether this has been profitable. If this had 
 been the indispensable condition of the trade between 
 the countries, possibly we may figure out a benefit. The 
 world stood aghast at the indemnity which Germany 
 compelled France to pay. It probably did not nearly
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS 121 
 
 cover the expenses of the war, and certainly has paid a 
 very small fraction of the expense of the great armament 
 which she has been compelled to maintain ever since, 
 and which grows year by year. She also received terri- 
 tory which had once been hers, but which had become 
 French in interests and feeling. In what way did this 
 benefit the German people ? It added certainly to the 
 aggregate wealth of the German Empire, but it added 
 in a like ratio to its necessities. It added nothing, of 
 course, to the wealth of the world, and nothing to that 
 of individual Germans. Even to the revenues of the 
 state it added nothing which is not counterbalanced by 
 an increased expenditure. It did furnish additional war 
 material ; but if war is an injury, then this simply 
 means additional means of injuring itself and others. 
 It raised an almost implacable hatred, a deeply settled 
 purpose on the part of the French to be revenged. It 
 has held an unwilling people, whose opposition is perhaps 
 with a new generation beginning to die out. Commer- 
 cially and industrially there was, it must be clear to the 
 slightest reflection, no advantage which could not have 
 been secured by equitable trade relations. For what- 
 ever view we may take as to the desirability or necessity 
 of tariffs for the sake of protection or for the encourage- 
 ment of home manufacture, no one surely will claim that 
 the addition to the price of an article adds anything to 
 its actual value for human use, or that for this purpose 
 it makes any difference whether it is produced under 
 one political jurisdiction or another. It may be said that 
 these equitable trade relations cannot be had except 
 through war. It would certainly be difficult to show
 
 122 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 that a country has ever vokmtarily conceded trade 
 advantages to one which has beaten it in war. If actu- 
 ally conquered and annexed, the whole matter of trade 
 concessions of course vanishes with the elimination of 
 one of the traders. 
 
 Probably a great many intelligent persons believe that 
 the great activity which frequently follows a war is a 
 compensation, and even more, for its losses. It is only, 
 in fact, an illustration of the law of supply and demand, 
 registering the increased waste and consumption of the 
 war, with a diminished production during the same 
 period. We witness the same phenomena every few 
 years from purely commercial causes. The same thing 
 is observable in disasters from fire, flood, and earthquake. 
 The recovery of Chicago from almost total destruction 
 of its business was a great surprise. Would it have been 
 still more advantageous if the balance of its property had 
 also been swept away .-' If so, the maintenance of a fire 
 department is an expensive mistake. Would it not have 
 been well to have burned the rest of our cities while we 
 were about it ? And about how often should this process 
 be repeated .'' 
 
 Now, there is just enough of truth in all this absurdity 
 to make the idea dangerous to those whose reasoning is 
 superficial. Post hoc, propter hoc, is as far as many can 
 go. The reconstruction of a city or district is, in fact, 
 beneficial to so7ne people. Material furnishers and work- 
 men may reap an advantage, though they probably have 
 lost more in the destruction than they will gain. A ship- 
 wreck is a benefit to the beach combers. Physicians 
 profit from disease, and dentists from toothache. But
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS I 23 
 
 none of these things adds anything to the world's store 
 of wealth, which means things which it desires to use. 
 It may help to redistribute wealth ; but this is also true 
 of theft and robbery. If war really has added anything 
 to the world's production, except the agencies for further 
 destruction, we ought from this logic to desire perpetual 
 warfare. 
 
 It is quite true that where a city like Chicago has 
 been destroyed, a new and more magnificent one will 
 take its place. The ground is clear, and the new city 
 will represent the advance during the period since the 
 first building". Each generation profits by the experience 
 of those which have preceded it. A building is planned 
 to meet a certain want and designed for specific uses. 
 Sooner or later the conditions change, and it is no longer 
 adapted to these. It is less useful than its competitors 
 and is no longer fitted to survive. It is taken down and 
 another fills its place. The process is going on in all our 
 cities, in some more rapidly than in others. It is only a 
 question of time, and not very long either, when the 
 existing Chicago will all give way to a still newer. It is 
 sheer lunacy, however, which can imagine the total 
 destruction of a city to be a benefit to the world. 
 There is no way in which the destruction of the 
 products of industry can be beneficial so long as they 
 are capable of subserving their intended uses. When 
 they have become obsolete peace itself destroys or 
 reconstructs them to adapt them more completely to 
 designed uses. War and peace are simply antithetical 
 or antagonistic forces, their processes opposite, their 
 aims as different as life and death. They can never be
 
 124 
 
 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 brought into harmony and relationship with each other. 
 War annihilates the products of peace. Peace, in turn, 
 destroys the destructions of war by restoring her own. 
 And if it were true that war made the arts of peace still 
 more effectual, we should still be obliged to say that the 
 benefits of war come not in war but in not-war. While 
 the fighting goes on all energies are bent to destruction 
 only ; when it is over all are employed in construction 
 and distribution. War is a benefit, therefore, to the ex- 
 tent to which it does not exist. It is the exact dupli- 
 cate of the schoolboy's idea that pins have saved the 
 lives of a great many people by their not swallowing 
 them. 
 
 It still should be noted, though I may not dwell upon 
 this point, that in the exceptional cases where war is a 
 benefit to a particular person or class, like famine, pesti- 
 lence, shipwreck, fire, and earthquake, the benefit is 
 usually much less than is supposed. The farmers at the 
 North very commonly thought that the Civil War was a 
 benefit to them through the rise in the price of farm 
 products. Taking into the account the increased cost of 
 machinery, tools, labor, and family supplies, taxes direct 
 and indirect, this was a complete delusion. It was in 
 reality an enormous burden, eased somewhat by distribu- 
 tion through many years. In any case, whatever the 
 advantage to the farmer, it was offset by the disadvan- 
 tage to the consumer. It was largely illusory at best, as 
 these were the prices in a depreciated currency, which 
 was one of the fruits of the war. But in whatever way 
 we turn it about, we shall find that the advantages 
 accrued not to the war but to the not-war, while the loss
 
 SOME OBJECTIONS 125 
 
 and injury were chargeable to the war, not to the pursuits 
 of peace. It may be conceded that a neutral nation does 
 derive a temporary advantage from the calamities of its 
 neighbors engaged in war. In the long run it, in com- 
 mon with organized and mutually dependent human 
 labor and effort, must help to make good the loss from 
 destruction and the negative result of withdrawing so 
 much labor from productive industries. 
 
 It is idle to prolong this discussion, or to multiply 
 illustrations. If the matter is not already clear, I believe 
 nothing will make it so. If the reason is perverted by 
 preconceptions which hold themselves out as religion, 
 duty, patriotism, or what not good thing, appealing to 
 the conscience, sophisticated or unenlightened though 
 it be, there is no opening to such a mind. All that 
 can be done is to exercise the other virtues, — patience 
 and hope. After all there is progress. From the dawn 
 of life the tendency is steadily in one direction. There 
 have seemed to be long halts ; there have been seeming, 
 not actual, retrogressions, — eddies in the mighty stream 
 whose onward sweep is unperceived. There has been no 
 change of direction, no backward turn. Slowly, imper- 
 ceptibly, imperturbably, like any growth, reason widens 
 her domain. Civilization and Christianity are one. From 
 absolute antagonism, universal and ceaseless combat, im- 
 placable hatred and unconditioned selfishness, the law of 
 life has evolved combination, interdependence, sympa- 
 thy, and common interests. "Moreover it will not be in 
 my day," said Hezekiah, concerning the calamity which 
 was to come to his nation. Not in ours will come the 
 crowning glory to the human race. But while those who
 
 126 THE ETHICS OF FORCE 
 
 have striven for truth and rationality fall away, others 
 press into their places. Truth is not lost, nor is it in 
 danger. The day is dawning, and there is light in the 
 sky. By and by the sun will gild first the high and 
 secret mountain tops, and then spread downward to 
 the plains, and finally flood every valley and glen and 
 savage chasm, and the shadows of the long and dismal 
 night will flee away.
 
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