to all nations of Christendom—indeed, of the world—since commercial and industrial development is world-wide, it necessarily means, if it is true of any one nation, that the world as a whole is drifting away from the tendency to warfare.
A large part of Homer Lea's book is a sort of Carlylean girding at what he terms "protoplasmic gourmandizing and retching" (otherwise the busy American industrial and social life of his countrymen). He declares that, when a country makes wealth, production, and industries its sole aim, it becomes "a glutton among nations, vulgar, swinish, arrogant"; "commercialism, having seized hold of the American people, overshadows it, and tends to destroy not only the aspirations and world-wide career open to the nation, but the Republic itself." "Patriotism in the true sense" (i.e., the desire to go and kill other people) Homer Lea declares almost dead in the United States. The national ideals, even of the native-born American, are deplorably low:
There exists not only individual prejudice against military ideals, but public antipathy; antagonism of politicians, newspapers, churches, colleges, labor unions, theorists, and organized societies. They combat the military spirit as if it were a public evil and a national crime.
In that case, what, in the name of all that is muddleheaded, becomes of the "unchanging tendency towards warfare"? What is all this curious rhetoric of Homer Lea's (and I have dealt with him at some length, because his principles if not his language are those which characterize much similar literature in England, France, Germany, and the continent of Europe generally) but an admission that the whole tendency is not, as he would have us believe, towards war, but away from it? Here is an author who tells us that war is to be forever inevitable, and in the same breath that men are rapidly conceiving not only a "slothful indifference" to fighting, but a profound antipathy to the military