Page 252 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 233

authority which is urgently needed in these
days when lawlessness is erected into a religion ?
It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expres-
sion and movements of a number of rustic
conscripts undergoing their first drills, and to
contrast them with the finished result as seen
in the faces and bearing of the soldiers that
throng the streets. A military training is not
the worst preparation for an active life, any
more than the years spent at college are time
lost, as another school of utilitarians insists.
Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace
better secured, by the mutual respect of na-
tions for each other s strength ; and that, when
a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly, leav-
ing the ordinary course of events to resume
sooner, and therefore more easily ? War now
not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the
character of an occasional excess, from which
recovery is easy. A century or more ago it
was a chronic disease. And withal, the mili-
tary spirit, the preparedness — not merely the
willingness, which is a different thing — to
fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good,
is more widely diffused and more thoroughly
possessed than ever it was when the soldier