Page 139 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

120 Possibilities of an

for authority and law, by which military train-
ing conveys a potent antidote to lawlessness, it
still would remain a mistake, plausible but
utter, to see in the hoped-for subsidence of the
military spirit in the nations of Europe a pledge
of surer progress of the world towards universal
peace, general material prosperity, and ease.
That alluring, albeit somewhat ignoble, ideal is
not to be attained by the representatives of
civilization dropping their arms, relaxing the
tension of their moral muscle, and from fight-
ing animals becoming fattened cattle fit only
for slaughter.
When Carthage fell, and Rome moved on-
r
ward, without an equal enemy against whom to
guard, to the dominion of the world of Mediter-
ranean civilization, she approached and gradu-
ally realized the reign of universal peace, broken
only by those intestine social and political dis-
sensions w hich are finding their dark analogues
T
in our modern times of infrequent war. As the
strife between nations of that civilization died
away, material prosperity, general cultivation
and luxury, flourished, while the weapons
dropped nervelessly from their palsied arms.
The genius of Caesar, in his Gallic and Ger-