THE AGE OF ECONOMIES
The next century will certainly be a frugal age in the sense of
planetary frugality. With a greatly-increased call on the resources
of the world entailed by the vast increase of population it will
be absolutely necessary for us to "make the most of what we here do
spend." And with the more humane and gentler notions which will prevail
it is also certain that the new age will be an age of cheapness. Of
course, cheapness is a purely relative matter. The suit of clothes
which would be very cheap at seven guineas in the United States
would be very dear at that price here, not merely because by reason
of the tariff clothes and other things are expensive in America,
but also because wages are higher there than in England. In spite of
the enormous growth of population since, say, the accession of Queen
Victoria, the standard of comfort is much higher now than then, and
prices are lower, because production has increased more quickly than
population. Comforts are cheaper, wages are higher. But the standard
of comfort will be higher still a hundred years hence. Workmen will
earn a greater share of the commodities of life, and whether their
pay be higher, computed as money, or lower, makes no difference to the
question of cheapness. If wages are low commodities will be low-priced:
that is all.
And probably this is the turn that events will take, though, even then,
the monetary earnings of the worker will probably be much higher than
they are nowadays. It is doubtful whether so clumsy a contrivance
as metallic currencies, of intrinsic values corresponding with their
titles, can survive at all; but of course everything will be computed
in terms of some currency or other--perhaps of an obsolete currency. We
are apt to think that the steady value of gold can be counted upon
to remain a constant factor of economics. But only a very small part
of the real business of the world is even now transacted with actual
gold. Much the greatest part is transacted in paper--that is by the
simple balancing of debits against credits in various clearing-houses.
Of course, if there were any reason to suppose that State Socialism
would be the political basis of future institutions, currency of
intrinsic value (which practically means, even now, only gold currency)
would be easily dispensed with, because almost every transaction would
be effected by means of orders on the national treasury, the State
owning practically everything. Some visionaries have long included
the abolition of money in their schemes for the immediate economic
improvement of the race. But the disuse of a currency is not really a
means to any end. It is only an effect which may or may not arise out
of certain alterations in commercial method. There are signs that the
people are already growing tired of the extravagance attached to the
system of State, and even of municipal, trading: and this fact makes
socialism improbable. Constant complaints are heard about such things
as municipal tramways and municipal gasworks, and the proposal to
transfer the entire working of telephones to the Government has been
fiercely opposed. Where the post-office works telephones side by side
with a telephone company, as in London, there is no indication that
the public prefers the Government service before the private service;
and it is admitted that tramways privately owned work more cheaply and
yield better returns on their capital than municipal tramways. Any
interference of the State in matters that could practically be left
to private enterprise provokes incessant complaint. When continued and
developed, however, this interference has a vicious habit of extending
itself into fresh fields. Having first undertaken the education
of the people the State was not long in carrying that system to its
natural limit by relieving parents of school fees. Now, free meals for
poor children, or meals sold below cost, are gradually becoming the
fashion; what is the use of reading out lessons to children who are
too hungry to listen? So the State must feed as well as educate. From
this to the free clothing of school children is a very short step. But
once the unavoidable sequence of such things is recognised, public
opinion begins to revolt, asking where, if we go on at this rate,
we are likely to stop, so long as there is any parental duty that the
State has omitted to assume. We perceive that, unless the process is
arrested, the begetter of children will have no obligations left,
and the awful effects of relieving every member of the public of
all responsibility being at length recognised, there is sure to be a
reaction. It is certainly not beyond the wit of man to contrive that
it shall be impossible for parents to leave their children untaught,
without Government taking upon itself the function of schoolmaster. A
hundred years hence I hope that it will long have been unnecessary
to use force at all to compel parents to educate their children:
and by that time the folly of our (perhaps temporarily unavoidable)
expedients will be laughed at, and the fatuity of a minimum standard
of proficiency, which inevitably becomes the maximum standard also,
will be wondered at. In the matter here selected as the most convenient
for illustration, and in other matters where State powers, or powers
devolved by the State, are now employed in enterprises which do
not properly fall into the province of Governments, the abuses and
wastefulness of governmental interference are already acting as the
best possible object-lessons against further interferences of the
kind which makes for socialism.
But of all the restraining influences inimical to socialism, none will
be anything like so powerful in the present century as the new anxiety
with which the people will safeguard their own self-respect. It must
be borne in mind, and cannot be too often repeated, that before many
decades, systems of education will be valued chiefly in proportion as
they tend to develop and establish character in the individual. And
with the recognition of the great truth that character is much the
most important thing in the world, there will grow up a great jealousy
of anything which tends to damage the public sense of individual
responsibility. This jealousy cannot but be adverse to socialism,
whose ideal is to relieve the individual of all responsibilities and
to throw them upon committees.
Not that the value of organisation and combination for various objects
will at all be lost sight of. But we shall perceive that voluntary
combination is a form of self-government vastly more friendly to the
preservation of self-respect than legislative action, and also a form
much less likely to be oppressive. It will be seen, for instance,
that it is more desirable for working men to fix, through their
trade-unions, the hours of labour in various industries, arranging
to meet exceptional circumstances where the latter arise, than for
Parliament to decree that nobody shall work more than eight hours
a day. Neither is the panacea of compulsory arbitration in trade
disputes likely to be a feature of future politics, because we shall
certainly not be long before we perceive that, while it is no doubt
quite easy to compel employers and employed to submit their respective
cases to a tribunal appointed by law, there is no known way in which
the award of such a tribunal can be enforced, and if there were, the
effect of its employment would be almost intolerably injurious to the
commerce of the country. What will happen a hundred years hence is
that trade disputes will have disappeared, because all the workers
will be practically their own employers.
Consequently free contract and not socialism will be the basis of
the political system of a hundred years hence, and the standard of
comfort will be adjusted in the same way as everything else. But in
order that this standard may be as high as the advanced humanity of
the new age will certainly demand for a population vastly increased,
it will be necessary that all the resources of the planet be made the
most of. That motive power, one of the most important, if not the most
important of all these resources, should be economically produced is,
as has already been said, an absolute essential. When we make the most
of the sources of power, and are able to apply power in convenient
and portable ways to all sorts of work at present done by hand, one of
the greatest economies conceivable will have been effected. Probably
muscle, as an element of workmanship, will become quite obsolete,
though muscular strength will be developed by athletics as a recreation
and a safeguard to the health of the race. Here again self-respect will
be sedulously nurtured, for nothing fosters it so much as a man's sense
of his inherent bodily power. All sorts of wastefully laborious methods
of labour will be superseded, in the same way as the steam hammer
has superseded the sledge hammer. With the perfect development of
power-production achieved, a great deal of the dirtiness of manufacture
will vanish: and moreover, a use will have been discovered for every
by-product of every manufacture. We are hideously wasteful as yet: and
wastefulness makes for dirt. One perceives this at once on comparing a
factory where the by-products are of a nature to be utilised directly,
with one where these products are of small value. A goldsmith's shop
is a clean place compared with the gasworks of even a modern town:
but these again are clean compared with what they used to be before
the various chemical uses of coal-tar and gas-liquor were discovered.
In the planning of machinery, notwithstanding the fact that power
will be obtained at a minimum of expense, all contrivances which
economise force will be highly valued. We have been increasingly
valuing them ever since steam first became important as a source
of motive power. Early machines in the Patents' Museum at South
Kensington exhibit the most extraordinary recklessness in the waste
of power. Considering the feebleness of the motive force available,
one would have expected that every means would be sought to minimise
friction. But instead, the force was transmitted by contrivances which,
to a modern eye, seemed deliberately contrived to introduce as much
friction as possible. Every year brings out fresh inventions for the
avoidance of friction: and still we are but upon the very threshold
of the subject. It was only in 1904 that a party of railway engineers
was entertained by a patentee who wished to show them the saving in
coal per train-mile which can be saved by a new bearing for passenger
coaches, and the superior smoothness (which is of course a factor in
the economy) of their running. Hardly any vehicle except a bicycle
or a trotting buggy is yet constructed with any serious attempt to
save friction at the axles. The number of industrial machines to
which ball-bearings might be applied with great economy of power
is enormous. But ball-bearings are very little used. It is probably
considered as yet that the saving in coal would not pay for the working
expenses connected with them and with other improvements. But as
machinery is further improved economies at present merely theoretical
will become practical and remunerative. In a hundred years' time
we shall certainly be able to make generally profitable the use
of many devices as yet applicable only to delicate and exceptional
machines, and shall be able to use much power which at present runs to
waste. Every time a locomotive is stopped there is a great waste of
power in the operation of the brakes, because it is not worth while
to adopt any contrivance for utilising it. It disappears, as heat,
and is lost. Many similar wastages could be cited, and engineers
would scoff at the citation, on the ground that the loss is not worth
saving. But it will be worth saving a hundred years hence. We shall
not be able to afford any waste. The world will have to be worked,
as we say, "for all it is worth."
Of course all sorts of other wastes will be avoided through the natural
progress of discovery and the natural development of thought. Illness
is a waste. Illness will be much less common in a hundred years'
time. A man who eats and consumes the world's products without
contributing to them will be too expensive a luxury for the new
age to indulge itself with: and the present excuse for a "leisure"
class--already scorned in America--that a rich and leisured class
fosters and patronises the arts, will be absurd. All classes will
foster and patronise the arts. For, just as we shall see that idleness
is waste (and even more injurious to the idler than to his fellows),
so we shall also see that overwork is a waste, because the legitimate
purpose of human endeavour is not wealth, but happiness. When all work,
all will be able to play.
Planetary economy will be a determining factor in the change of diet
which the coming century must inevitably witness. Such a wasteful food
as animal flesh cannot survive: and even apart from the moral necessity
which will compel mankind, for its own preservation, to abandon the
use of alcohol, the direct and indirect wastefulness of alcohol will
make it impossible for beverages containing it to be tolerated. Very
likely tobacco will follow it. We are already in sight of legislation
to restrain the use of tobacco by the young. It will probably be
unnecessary for the law to prohibit its use by adults. The frugal adult
of the new age will abandon it unbidden, the change taking place as
smoothly and silently as the process from the universal drunkenness
of our great-grandfathers to the relative sobriety of ourselves,
a process of which it is surprising that anyone can fail to perceive
that the natural end must be the total disuse of alcoholic drinks. All
things work their way to their natural conclusion, and there is no
more fertile source of sociological blindness than the fallacy which
treats certain phenomena of society as static, whereas all phenomena
of society are really in the dynamic state, and always must be so.
In such matters as the exhaustion of the soil, and the reckless
waste of wood, our present practice will certainly be reformed. There
will be great improvements in agricultural chemistry, necessitated
by the disappearance of animal manure. The obsolescence of the
horse is already in sight; probably we ourselves shall see the day
when the horse will cease to be employed except in the organised
material of war: and as soon as we cease to eat animals we shall
cease to herd cattle, sheep and poultry. But some means will have
to be found for returning to the soil the materials we take out of
it. Of course the idiotic wastefulness of many systems of sewage
disposal, and the dangers, inconveniences and degrading occupations
associated with existing alternatives, will be rectified. By improved
agricultural methods, lands at present unutilised will be brought
under cultivation: and the wasteful and selfish reservation of
game preserves, deer forests and excessive pleasure-grounds will
have to be abolished--not by legislative enactment, but probably
by spontaneous social developments; by the natural development, in
short, of economy in the world's possessions. A hundred years hence
we shall cease to behave as though the resources of the planet were
illimitable and could be wasted at will. In the succession of the
ages the spendthrift will have given birth to the miser, reversing the
usual order of generations. No doubt the attention concentrated upon
agriculture as a consequence of the greatly increased use of vegetable
and cereal foods will have, as one of its consequences, the discovery
of new means for improving all sorts of crops--means of which even the
wonderful achievements of the scientific agriculture of the present
day do not contain even the first germs. We shall also, perhaps,
find means for avoiding the terrible losses and wastage entailed by
climatic accidents. At all events, irrigation will be perfected, and
probably we shall be able by acclimatisation and modification to find
uses for crops that will flourish during that portion of the year when,
in temperate climates, the land at present lies idle. This will both
stimulate and further necessitate the improvements in agricultural
chemistry already mentioned.
As the combustions of solids will no longer be a general method of
obtaining heat, we shall greatly economise wood; and the wickedly
mischievous word "inexhaustible" will not be applied to timber
regions like the Rocky Mountain district of Canada. Arboriculture will
become a more practical art than it as yet shows any signs of being;
and along with careful afforestation will go skilled improvement in
tree-growing. We shall replace all the trees we use by better trees,
better cultivated. Even so, however, there will have to be devised
great economies in the use of wood--economies like the recent invention
of a method by which, instead of being wastefully sawn into planks,
a tree-trunk can be cut up spirally, so that almost the whole of it
may be used. In many places where wood is now employed in the arts,
metals will doubtless be used instead, their greater neatness and
durability making it advisable thus to substitute them, for reasons of
convenience as well as economy; and probably new alloys, into which
the lighter metals, as aluminium, will enter, may give us increased
strength without increased weight, which will again be an economy,
because it will save power. But even so, the world's expenditure of
wood will continue to be enormous.
War has been alluded to above. War is too wasteful, as well as too
imbecilely uncivilised, to survive this century. It may be well to
inquire as to the manner in which its abolition is most likely to be
brought about. We may take it for granted that no sudden political
or revolutionary movement will abolish the physical conflict of
peoples. "All the arts which brutalise the practical polemist" will not
be abandoned at a moment's notice on the bidding of any potentate or
combination of potentates. To conceive of them as thus abandoned is to
overlook the whole nature of political change. It is absurd (as Herbert
Spencer remarks) to assume "that out of a community morally imperfect
and intellectually imperfect, there may in some way be had legislative
regulation that is not proportionately imperfect." But it would be
equally absurd to believe that the moral and intellectual advance which
our present tendencies show to be gradually taking place--an advance
certain to be greatly accelerated during the middle half of the next
hundred years--can fail to put a stop to war as a political device.
War will probably not be dispensed with in response to any great and
sudden revolt of the world's conscience against the bloodshed and
other evils much worse than bloodshed which it entails--of which
indeed it actually consists. The world knows quite well already
that war is wicked, wasteful and silly: if it were possible for a
suddenly-exasperated realisation of this to take an instantaneous
effect, we could and should similarly abolish numerous other evils
which we show every disposition to tolerate for some time yet. The
fact that single families are able to hold wealth in enormous excess
of the maximum amount which it can possibly be good for the community
that individuals should hold, is such an evil. The "Yellow" journalism
of America and England is another evil just about as difficult, or as
easy, to abolish at a stroke as war, and not much less injurious. The
manipulation of tariffs and currencies to suit the greedy aims of
manufacturers, landowners and capitalists is another evil which is
constantly experienced or threatened in one part of the world or
another; and if as a race we were yet enlightened enough to utter
that great "Peace; be still!" which must some day be breathed over the
troubled waters of international diplomacy, we should be enlightened
enough to rid ourselves of these other evils. But instead, the change
must be gradually worked up to. It is not even at all certain that the
whole world will at one given moment decide to abandon war. It is not
necessarily the case that the first nation enlightened enough to lay
down the sword would immediately fall under the oppression of its armed
neighbours, as Bismarck prophesied, and would no doubt have practised
to arrange. Nor need we assume, as so many have thought it necessary
to believe, that universal peace can only follow the exhaustion of
universal war, the dove winging her first flight over the shambles of
Armageddon. I do not for an instant believe that the actual horrors of
war are the likely or possible source of peace; on the contrary, war
always tends to breed war, partly through international exasperation,
partly through the unashamed and cynical self-seeking of professional
warriors. Peace hath her outrages no less severe than war. It is
against the preparation for war, rather than against war itself,
that we shall revolt.
Of course the increased urbanity of future thought, the tenderer
conscience of the future, will help the cause of peace. The world's
rulers will be more humane, less reckless than those set up by the
inferior morality and intellect of the present age. It is not from
the rulers, but from the ruled, however, that peace will come. It is
the peoples that will refuse to be the supporters of idle, useless,
profligate and dangerous millions, trained to no duty but slaughter,
skilful only in the service of national crime. Every decade will see
the burden of armament grow heavier. In every decade fresh efforts will
be made to lift the weight of them off the rich, the governing classes,
and throw it upon the poor, the governed classes. The workers will
be taxed, and their taxes manipulated to their disadvantage. And they
must pay in person as well as purse. There is no civilised and highly
developed country in the world that can possibly escape universal
military service within the next quarter of a century, unless it be
the United States: and only that country if the people of the United
States abandon absolutely their present dreams of empire and renounce
the luxury of an effective Foreign Office. As for ourselves, it is
most likely universal naval service that we shall have to endure. And
the rulers of the nations will play the chess of diplomacy, using the
peoples as their pawns, until the pawns, grown wiser than the bishops,
and more agile than the knights, reach the eighth square of intellect
and become sovereign in themselves. It is not by high diplomacy
that war will be abandoned, but by the will of the workers. Only a
very careless and unthoughtful observer of the last fifteen years'
history can have failed to note the steady growth of international
solidarity in labour questions. The trade societies of different
nations frequently contribute to each other's strike-funds: they
constantly communicate and confer, and they do so with increasing
frequency and effectiveness every time there is any special advantage
to be seen in joint action against the common enemy--greed. Conceive
for an instant what is going to be the effect of this when working
men and women, infinitely the most important and most worthy part of
the race, are no longer degraded by stupid restrictions of education,
no longer brought up on the insane system of striving only for a
stuffed memory instead of for a developed character, and have learned
to think about their political duties instead of only transacting them
without thought, without any possible opportunity of learning how to
think. The whole mass of workers throughout the world will come to
an understanding. They have no possible conflicting interests which
can compare in importance with the interests which, for their class,
are identical all the world over. Already the improved morality of
the peoples will have yielded improved governments, more enlightened
parliaments, wiser statesmanship. The administrative organ will
only need to be properly stimulated by the solid agreement of workers
throughout civilisation. There is never the least sign of international
or racial jealousy among working men in their international relations,
and what, by reason of the clash of international interests and the
danger of national aggression diplomatists could not accomplish, the
irresistible volition of the unanimous peoples will force upon the
cabinets of the world. It will come about by degrees. The preparations
for it will be long visible, long misunderstood. And we shall usefully
tinker at the question, often stave off little dangers of war by
arbitrations, treaties of mutual understanding, peace conferences and
the like; and though probably no great war necessary to reconcile the
conflicting destinies of peoples was ever prevented by such means,
we shall avoid many fights which might have arisen out of the vain
notions of prestige, dignity, and national self-sufficiency. But
once means have been found for the destruction of the machinery of
war, the worst danger of war will have been got rid of: and then the
practice we shall have had in settling disputes peacefully will be
of the greatest service to us.
When the armies and the navies of the world are disbanded there will be
a condition of affairs which it is highly necessary to consider. In all
nations entitled to rank as world-powers there is an enormous military
class. When the armies go home for the last time, and magazine rifles
and machine guns become museum objects and nothing more; when it is no
longer conceived to be the greatest service a man can render to his
country to organise clubs wherein men may inexpensively learn how to
shoot, so as to be able to kill each other with a creditable precision
when the chance comes; then there will arise the problem of how to
employ these disbanded drones: and to some this problem has appeared to
present acute difficulties on account of the labour-problem involved.
But to apprehend anything beyond the most transient embarrassments from
this cause is surely to misconceive the whole subject of economics. The
men at present withdrawn from productive labour by employment,
either transiently (as in countries where conscription is used),
or more or less permanently (as in England), have to be fed, clothed
and housed in any event; and they can only be thus supplied with the
commodities of life by the labour of other men. What the term of their
military service happens to be is immaterial to the subject. Whether
there are standing armies and navies with long or short service, and
a reserve; or armies and navies served for three years by successive
drafts; the amount of labour withdrawn in any community is at any one
period the same in that community. The return to civil life of the
volunteer armies employed in the United States during the Civil War
and the war of the deliverance of Cuba did not produce troublesome
economic conditions; and only those persons who think that a society
is enriched by the circulation of money spent in wasteful expenditure
like the fireworks and banquets consumed in celebrating an event
like the visit of a foreign potentate, or commemorating more or less
irrelevantly the failure of "Gunpowder treason and plot," can imagine
that a nation would be impoverished by the vast accession to its
productive power yielded by the abolition of armaments. Similarly,
to think that the suppression of Woolwich arsenal and the closing
of Krupp's gun factory would be an industrial calamity instead of
an enormous saving of national money, is to adopt the uninstructed
view of politics which conceives of governments as self-supported
and self-created institutions whose expenditure is a gift to the
people; instead of as being organisations paid by the people out of
earnings which would otherwise be enjoyed by themselves. This sort
of conception, fatuous as it appears when once reduced to logical
terms, is common enough. Whenever any object of popular desire
appears inaccessible we are always being told that the Government
ought to provide it--as if Government were a sort of deity capable of
producing wealth from somewhere outside the world. But such notions
have only to be for a moment examined in order that their fallacy may
become manifest and palpable; and it is equally easy to see that the
wealth-producing power of the men composing armies would be a direct
gift to the community of the world if armies were abolished, and that
the moneys formerly, but no longer, expended upon their accoutrements,
weapons and sustenance would be so much waste obviated. Here will,
in fact, be one of the many economies of a hundred years hence.
It will be convenient to digress, in passing, in order to notice one
very curious contention sometimes rather fancifully introduced into
discussions on the subject of universal peace.
It is stated that war is an inevitable feature of national life, and
that it exercises a beneficent effect upon national character--that it
fosters manliness and a respect for the virile attributes of courage,
steadfastness and self-respect; that nations which have abandoned
the art of war sink into effeminacy, slothfulness and destructive
luxury; and that the peace of the nations, if it ever comes, will
be associated with a terrible deterioration of the race. As to the
notion that anything can prevent the abolition of armed conflict as
a means of settling the differences of peoples, we may very well be
satisfied to await the issue. No one who recognises the steady growth
of humanitarian feeling; no one who remembers, even to deplore, our
growing sentimentalism; no one who has insight enough to perceive
that progress, at an ever-increasing speed, must inevitably be
accompanied by advanced intellectuality, increased self-restraint and
greater wisdom, can doubt that a process so illogical, barbarous and
brutalising as battle must be banished, as well by the new humanity as
by the economic necessities of our race. But the notion of deploring,
on moral grounds, the assured coming of a reform so salutary, calls
for more strenuous reprobation. One would have thought it evident,
from the popular effect of the war in South Africa, that, so far from
being a matter for self-congratulation, this highly necessary war was
a terrible lesson in the brutalising effect of armed conflict, not
alone on the men actually engaged, but also on the people who remained
at home. Indeed, since it is only a comparatively small fraction of a
community that can ever be personally active in military operations,
the effect on the home-stayers is evidently what the upholders
of war as a civilising influence must be thinking of. It would be
ridiculous, and it is quite unnecessary to the argument, to deny the
fine qualities of determination, of fortitude before national disaster,
and of calm confidence in the prowess of the nation's arms which, in
the bulk of the English people, the Transvaal war called forth. It
would be just as idle to deny the sublime exhibition of patriotism
and self-abnegation which, on one side at least, was provoked by the
Russo-Japanese war. But it would also be foolish not to recognise
the quite evident brutalisation which has followed our war in South
Africa, the remarkable increase in crimes of murderous violence, and
especially of double crimes--murder and suicide--which has lately
occurred. The true source of these increased evils is the reflex
effect of familiarity (either at first hand, or more remotely through
newspaper reading and through the personal narrative of returned
soldiers) with the notion of violent slaying, and the diminished
sense of the sanctity of human life which accompanies the spectacle
of man-slaying by wholesale held up to popular admiration, and indeed
necessitated and justified by the conditions of war and the duty of
patriotism. No doubt it is true (as has been finely said) that there
is one thing which is worse for a nation than war, and that is that
a nation should be so afraid of war as to submit to aggression rather
than fight in defence of its rights. But to subscribe to this doctrine,
which no rational thinker will dispute, is a very different thing from
agreeing that the nations would be otherwise than strengthened and
civilised by the universal abandonment of battle. Probably we are as
yet some decades from the time when we shall have sufficient nobility
of sentiment to be entirely agreed, without a single dissentient,
in recognising the enormous service to national and international
morality which Mr Gladstone rendered when he had the courage to
withdraw from the conflict with the Boers after Majuba. It will
be long before we are logical enough to see that the fact of this
magnanimity having been basely abused does not in the least detract
from its moral weight and moral beneficence. But the influence of such
an act cannot be without effect upon progress. It is by such acts,
and the possibility of their glad acceptance by nations of sufficient
moral elevation to perform them, that war will be banished.
In the meantime, while noble virtues can be displayed by nations in
time of combat, and by civilians as well as soldiers, it is a new
doctrine that we are asked to accept when we are told that there is
anything individually elevating to the character in sitting at home
while someone else goes out and fights for that home's protection. One
of the least satisfactory features of public interest in games of
manly endeavour and endurance, games of danger and violent effort,
like football and cricket, is that of the very greatly increased
numbers who "follow" these games and watch the fortunes of selected
teams in the Cup contests only a very small proportion play the
games themselves. Thousands of young men hardly see a football match
from September to April, though they keenly follow the admirable
descriptions of them in their sporting papers. It is taking a very
short-sighted view to applaud the growing interest in athletics, which,
just now, we show, as a sign of our manliness. Not very much endurance
is required in order to bet on the success of a favourite team: and to
assist, as a contributor to gate-moneys, in paying selected athletes
to endure risk and violent fatigue in a game which one does not play
for oneself is exactly on a level with applauding the exploits of an
army to which one contributes nothing but taxes.
Moreover, this beneficent effect of actual war-in-progress could only
exercise itself during limited and distressful periods. No nation is
able to be seriously at war, in modern conditions, for very long, and
great periods of recuperation must intervene between war and war; the
combatant nations being meanwhile subject to aggressions from keepers
of the peace, because they are not in a position to fight again with
a fresh and an unexhausted adversary. Consequently, any beneficent
effect must be expected to be exercised chiefly in time of peace. And,
in practice, it does not seem to be the case that nations in which
the military standard is high and the military class is exalted above
the civil class, show always in any remarkable manner the virtues
supposed to be fostered by the manly art of war. No one would contend
that the average German is more self-reliant and self-respecting,
quicker to decide on action in a moment of stress, braver, manlier,
more enduring of reverses of fortune, than the average American. Yet
Germany, where military officers are held in such esteem that they
can behave with unrestrained arrogance and brutality towards civilians
in public places without provoking any signs of popular indignation,
unless when their acts are commented upon in the socialist newspapers;
and can even inflict disgusting and degrading indignities upon private
soldiers without being officially punished, except where they have
carried brutality to the limit (and they are punished with the
greatest tenderness even then): Germany, I say, ought to show the
virtues of a military state at their best. Whereas in America, where
there is practically no standing army, and where military titles,
the residue of wars conducted almost entirely by volunteer and
amateur soldiers, are so common that the very holders of them treat
these titles as subjects of humorous depreciation, the people are
conspicuous for manliness, for high endurance, for patience under the
reverses of fortune, for temperance: and in the average of physical
courage America far excels any military nation. There seems to be no
reason at all for apprehending that the obsolescence of militarism
will have a deleterious effect on the manhood of the race: while
there are incontestable evidences that it will greatly foster the
equally important virtues of gentleness, humanity, and respect for
the weak. Thus, while, for reasons of sentiment and common sense,
war is certain to become obsolete before the end of this century,
we shall find in the release of the funds and of the labour hitherto
employed in the organisation of war one of the greatest economies of
an age which in all things will be thrifty: and there is no reason at
all to apprehend difficulty in providing for the warrior who finds his
occupation gone, when we have so reorganised (as we must reorganise)
our social system, that no man will live in excessive luxury on the
labour of his fellows, but that all will be contributors to a common
frugality.