CHAPTER X

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.