NATURAL DECAY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE 397
Thia selective elimmation of conservative elements would in the long run leave each succeeding generation of the community less predatory and less emulative in temper, less well endowed for carrying on its life under the servile institutions proper to a militant regime. But, for the present and the nearer future, there can be little doubt but that this selective shaping of the community's animus is greatly outweighed by the contrary trend given by the discipline of warlike preoccupations. What helps to keep the balance in favor of the reversional trend is the cultural leaven carried back into the home community by the veterans. These presumptive past masters in the archaic virtues keep themselves well in the public eye and serve as exemplars to the impressionable members of the community, particularly to the less mature.'
VOT and military tenure in the case of these peoples should, therelore, appaKntly lower both their figbtlng capacity and their industrial and inullectnal capacity ; so that, hy force of this doable and cumulative effect, the resulting national decline should in their case be compreheaslTe and relatively precipitate.
With the complement of archaic virtues that invests these adepts there is bIho associated a fair complement of those more elemental vices that nre prowing obsolete in the peaceable civilized communities. Snch dehaucherieB, eitravBKances of cruelty, and general supeiHuityj of n&ughtineas as are nameless or impossible in civil life are blameless I matters of course in the service. In the nature of the case they are inseparable from the aerrice. The service commonly leaves the veterans physical, intellectual, and moral Invalids (as witness the records of the Pension OfSce). But these less handsome cuncomitanls of the service should scarcely be made a point of reproach