“I do not overlook the disadvantages of defeat in a war with some
foreign power,” said the Bald Campaigner; “I only say that in the
resulting humiliation would be a balance of advantage. It does a nation
good to ‘eat the leek.’ The great Napoleon thrust that tonic vegetable
into the mouths of Prussia and the other German states. They took a
bellyful each, and the result of that penitential feast is the splendid
German empire of to-day. Before their racial health was entirely
restored the Germans passed the unwelcome comestible to the ailing
dominion of Napoleon the Stuffed, and France has so thriven on the diet
that she no longer fears the hand that wrote the _menu_. Alone among
modern states, Great Britain has grown powerful without having had to
cry for mercy. In the voice of supplication is heard the prophecy of
power.”
The Timorous Reporter cautiously named our own country as one that has
risen to greatness without suffering defeat and humiliation.
“Sir, you are in error,” said the Bald Campaigner loftily. “We were
defeated in the War of 1812. Wherever our raw volunteers met the
trained veterans of Great Britain (except at New Orleans, when the war
was over) we were beaten off the field. Our attempts to invade Canada
were all repelled, our capital was taken and sacked, and when we sued
for peace it was granted in a treaty in which the grievance for which
we had taken up arms was contemptuously ignored.
“Remember that for this conflict we enlisted and equipped more than a
half-million men, while Great Britain had at no time more than sixteen
thousand opposing us.
“As historians of the conflict we have done heroic work, as have
Southern historians of our civil war and French historians of the
struggle with the Germans—as all beaten peoples naturally do. Sir,
do you know that the great body of the Spanish people believe, and
will always believe, that Spain brought us to our knees in 1898? The
Russian who does not think that the armies of the Czar wrung the most
humiliating terms from the Japanese is an exceptionally intelligent
Russian—he knows enough to disbelieve the ‘popular histories’ in the
Russian tongue and the official falsehoods of his government.”
The Timorous Reporter inquired how a second beating would profit us,
seeing that we got no good out of the other.
“The other was not bad enough,” the great man explained. “Having
Napoleon on her hands, Great Britain did not, until he had been got rid
of, make an aggressive war. When she began to we cried for mercy. What
we need is a beating that neither our vanity can deny nor our ingenuity
excuse—one which, in the slang of your pestilent trade, ‘will not come
off.’”
“And then?”
“Then, sir, we shall give ourselves an army strong enough to repel
invasion from the north, or, if something should happen to our
navy, from the east or west. Then, sir, we shall get our soldiers
by conscription, and the man who is drawn will serve. The words
‘volunteer,’ ‘recruiting,’ ‘bounty,’ ‘substitute’ will disappear from
our military vocabulary, with all the inefficiency, waste, and shame
that they connote. In brief, we shall recognize the truth, obvious
to reason, that a citizen owes his country military service in the
same way that he owes it pecuniary support. (If taxpaying had always
been optional what an expostulation would meet the proposal to make
it compulsory!) We shall then not need to concern ourselves with ‘the
problem of desertion,’ ‘the effect on the army of high wage-rates
in civil employment,’ and the rest of it. There will be no problem
of desertion: the discernment that recognizes a citizen’s military
obligation will find an effective method preventing him from running
away from it. All this will come after we have been sorely defeated by
some power, or combination of powers, that has not only a navy but an
army.”
The Timorous Reporter hesitatingly advanced the view that a large
standing army might seriously imperil the subordination of the military
to the civil power.
“Young man,” said the hairless veteran, austerely, “you talk like a
Founder of this Republic!”