than is just. It is putting a tax on industry for the sake of military glory. We may now feel our way to a statement of the necessary and thoroughgoing antagonism between a military empire and an empire which rests on industrial supremacy. Militaryism is essentially destructiveindustrialism is essentially constructive. This fact constitutes their radical antagonism. It forms a line of cleavage which goes through all sections of the two departments. One part of a nation may be given up to one of these, and another part to the other of them; but in so far as the military element is unduly allowed to prevail, in so far must the industrial forces be diminished. Those diminished industrial forces must supply what is needed for the military spirit to expend, and hence there is waste and loss in two ways. is a large deduction from the producing power of the nation caused by the diversion into military channels of what ought to go into industrial activity. And, since militaryism can do nothing but destroy, industrialism is of necessity called upon to supply the material for this wanton waste. Militaryism is just represented by its own gunpowder; it does nothing but explode force which industrialism had to create. There The war spirit is essentially a demon of destruction. To deface, to mutilate, to slay, to burn, is the only work it can do. It never rises higher than this, and it never can rise higher, in virtue of its very nature. It must change its inmost being, and become something other : than it is, before it can have any nobler mission. No doubt destruction is sometimes needed. As a limb may be gangrened, and a wise physician will then cut it off to save the whole body; so nations may be gangrened, and the sharp and stern methods of war may be needed in order to cut away the corrupting virus. But that does not alter the fact that war can only destroy-to build up afresh is beyond its power. Even when war seems to be constructive, as in the invention and the making of its engines, and in the planning by a great strategist of a campaign, this is manifestly nothing but its making use of the constructions which mechanical and mathematical science have placed at its disposal. At such a time it only flaunts in robes it did nothing to create, makes its boast in a glory to which it cannot lay one iota of claim. It was the patient artisan using his intellect in a constructive fashion who made possible those engines; it was the mathematician, carefully applying his calculus, who determined their projectile range; it was the inductive philosopher, making his far-reaching generalisations, who created that intellectual largeness which enabled. the strategist to handle a million of men as if they formed but one unit. Probably it was Kant who made possible Moltke. All this glamour and greatness which War seems to have is not her own. She has no essential glory. She is nothing but a demon of destruction, dissipating in an hour a force it cost perhaps generations to build up. The instruments and the methods of war are coarse and barbarous. An Armstrong gun costs many thousand pounds; but it cannot compare, in point of delicacy and mechanical skill, with a locomotive, or even a reapingmachine. It can do nothing but put forth a large amount of brute force; its greatest exploit is to send a huge projectile to a distance of five miles. It has no power to guide this force with any discrimination. It may throw down a fortress, but it may also set fire to a library where the wisdom of forty generations is stored. The results attained by the highest strategy are of the same rude and barbarous character. A man with a capacity for making those great generalisations in physical science, such as Newton and Faraday have given us, which have enriched, or will enrich, the whole human race, employs his brain in devising a great strategical movement. His device succeeds; and what is the sum total of result? He kills ten thousand men who would otherwise be left alive. That is all he does. That is the outcome of all that combination of refined mental energy which, expended on industrial and constructive lines, might have made the human race his debtor for ever. Thus the war spirit, in our day, is nothing but the survival of barbarism. It tells how much of the savage we have still left in us. In the degree to which it prevails it is an indication that our refinement and civilisation are only on the surface; that we have changed our methods, not our temper; and that we are still calling upon science and plastic skill to supply us with larger and stronger arms, so that we may kill off a greater number of our fellow-men in a shorter period. Now, in contrast to this, let us note the characteristics of the industrial spirit. It is essentially constructive. It does nothing but create and build up. It takes the force in man's body, the intellect in his brain, and, by means of these, it operates on material products, making out of them something that endures. It fashions and plies the loom, and thus creates textile fabrics; it digs into the mine, and brings thence iron and coal; it sets up huge factories, which give employment to millions of artisans, and it sends forth their work to be a blessing to mankind. On other ranges, it leads the man of science to investigate Nature, to look into her ways; and when, prophet-like, he has read the truth there written, it leads him to combine all his scattered facts into laws, so that any one, with suitable capacity, can grasp those laws and become as wise as he. Thus he increases the mental power of the race. Similarly with the poet, the philosopher, the artist, the musician. These build up in their own special modes; and in poem, picture, oratorio, they leave some enduring sign of their power. They touch our finer feelings, penetrate us with the sense of infinity, gently breathe into us intellectual might, make us grander and nobler over the whole range of being. All these, then, are beneficent energies, producing, creative, in the highest degree helpful to man. More radical antagonism than between these and the destructive military spirit there can nowhere exist. The two are in opposing realms, and the difference between them is wider than any intellectual chasm. The industrial spirit is essentially intelligent. It knows what it is going to do; it can tell the precise shape and pattern of the fabric it is about to make. The movements of all its machines are guided with unerring accuracy. It moves on its path of beneficent activity as exactly as the planets in their spheres. It is like the changeless laws of God, instinct with the force and intelligence of the mind from which it came. If we constrast the painfully uncertain path of a projectile in the air, which may or may not hit the mark, with the exquisite precision of a weaving machine, where each single thread is guided with faultless exactitude; or better still, if we note how the gifted artist arranges his most imperceptible shades so as to heighten the general effect, we may, in this way, obtain some faint notion how coarse, and rude, and clumsy are the appliances and the results of war when placed side by side with the noble and beautiful creations which the constructive spirit fashions. Thus the military spirit is essentially barbaric-the industrial spirit is as essentially civilized. Now it is not possible for a nation to walk on both these paths at once. To accept the one necessarily excludes the other. It is not possible to cherish militaryism except at the cost of industrial supremacy. In the exact degree to which it prevails in the councils of a nation is that nation weighted in its industrial energies. In that same degree is it committed to a policy which is barbaric and retrograde. The Statesman (adapted). |