accomplish nothing, will forever be unassailable because, once man has got the habit of doing a thing, he will go on doing it, although the reason which in the first instance prompted it has long since disappeared—because, in short, of the "unchangeability of human nature."
CHAPTER IV
DO THE WARLIKE NATIONS INHERIT THE EARTH?
The confident dogmatism of militarist writers on this subject—The facts—The lessons of Spanish America—How conquest makes for the survival of the unfit—Spanish method and English method in the New World—The virtues of military training—The Dreyfus case—The threatened Germanization of England—"The war which made Germany great and Germans small."
The militarist authorities I have quoted in the preceding chapter admit, therefore, and admit very largely, man's drift, in a sentimental sense, away from war. But that drift, they declare, is degeneration; without those qualities which "war alone," in Mr. Roosevelt's phrase, can develop, man will "rot and decay."
This plea is, of course, directly germane to our subject. To say that the qualities which we associate with war, and nothing else but war, are necessary to assure a nation success in its struggles with other nations is equivalent to saying that