But the true method of judging an event is to exercise comparison, taking into account a far greater mass of social phenomena than that of the immediate present. Now the careful study of past history has proved that an outbreak of militant fraternity, combined with indulgence in the principle of enmity, leaves a society less fraternal than before in regard to the labours of peace and of building up; and against the claim that military training is a good preparation for civic life there lies the whole testimony of civilization. Further, the survival of militancy frustrates the solving of our great social problems, and the recent relapse to the militarist ideal is a grave hindrance to that social science which would provide the true ways of humanizing defective types. (I refer my reader for a fuller statement on these lines to Mr. J. M. Robertson’s Patriotism and Empire.) “After Waterloo,” says Mr. Robertson, “it seems to have been realized by the intelligence of Europe that militarism and imperialism had alike pierced the hands that leant on them.” Nevertheless, they reappeared, as we know, galvanized into fatal activity in human affairs, at the close of the nineteenth century.

Again, the action of international capitalism and the ideal of imperialism have been analysed from the standpoint of social philosophy by Mr. J. A. Hobson, an advanced and logical thinker on economic questions. His conclusion is that the driving forces of aggressive imperialism are the organized influences of certain professional and commercial classes which have definite economic advantages to gain by assuming a spurious patriotism, and the most potent of all these influences emanates from the financier. The power of financiers, exerted directly upon politicians and indirectly through the press upon public opinion, is, perhaps, so says Mr. Hobson, the most serious problem in public life to-day.[[5]]

[5]. The Contemporary Review of January, 1900.

It is not by sanguinary conflicts in which victory turns on superior numbers, superior arms, and superior cunning in military tactics, that a nation’s greatness is built up at this period of the world’s history. What progress demands is not more of national wealth and international power; it is a better system of industrial life and a finer type of humanity—men and women of clear intellectual insight, high moral courage, unselfish instincts and humane sentiments guiltless of narrow exclusiveness. These men and women, discerning ideally the best methods of building up a nation’s greatness on the happiness of its people, will aid our half-civilized races to embody that ideal on the physical plane, and to educate their children to live up to it and show forth all its beauty.

In the mental basis of a high spiritual life even now our children are a reproach, for here and there they emit sparks indicative of embryonic sentiment in advance of practice around them. At the height of the Boer War a child in his nursery on being told that his nurse was opening a tin of boar’s head for breakfast, exclaimed, every feature quivering with sudden disgust, “Catch me eat my enemy’s head.”

When a nation repudiates with similar disgust that wholesale destruction of life, which is no whit less evil than the cannibalism of an earlier date, then will war and patriotism cease to be—their place taken by a civilization standing firm on the foundation of human happiness and love.

Given such outward conditions of life as are favourable to a freer exercise of the noblest social attributes and impulses of man, and the ethical temper will prevail. By ethical temper I mean not only the absence of all animosities that engender conflict, but the presence of a strong sense of personal rights and an equally strong protectiveness over the rights of others—a national impulse, in short, to an equivalence of liberty and social comfort for all mankind. But this justice is a supremely complex emotion—the one of all others that demands most of human capacity. It rests upon mental development, i.e. a universal enlargement of mind.

Industrial changes there must be, but these alone will not secure progress; we need true education, for in the deeper strata of existence—the region of feeling, the movements of change must be guided from the old order to the new. Hence the vital importance of moral education—an education that will create an intelligent appreciation of truth wherever presented, and bind all men together in loyalty to truth.

PART V
EDUCATION
OR
DIRECT TRAINING OF CHILDHOOD TO THE CIVILIZED HABIT OF MIND

We acquire the virtues by doing the acts.