How, indeed, could it be otherwise? How can modern life, with its overpowering proportion of industrial activities and its infinitesimal proportion of military ones, keep alive the instincts associated with war as against those developed by peace?
Not only evolution, but common sense and common observation, teaches us that we develop most those qualities which we exercise most, which serve us best in the occupation in which we are most engaged. A race of seamen is not developed by agricultural pursuits, carried on hundreds of miles from the sea.
Take the case of what is reputed (quite wrongly, incidentally) to be the most military nation in Europe—Germany. The immense majority of adult Germans—practically, all who make up what we know as Germany—have never seen a battle, and in all human probability never will see one. In forty years eight thousand Germans have been in the field about twelve months—against naked blacks.[66] So that the proportion of warlike activities to peaceful activities works out at one to hundreds of thousands. I wish it were possible to illustrate this diagrammatically; but it could not be done in this book, because, if a single dot the size of a full-stop were to be used to illustrate the expenditure of time in actual war, I should have to fill most of the book with dots to illustrate the time spent by the balance of the population in peace activities.[67]
In that case, how can we possibly expect to keep alive warlike qualities, when all our interests and activities—all our environments, in short—are peace-like?
In other words, the occupations which develop the qualities of industry and peace are so much in excess of those which would develop the qualities we associate with war that that excess has almost now passed beyond any ordinary means of visual illustration, and has entirely passed beyond any ordinary human capacity fully to appreciate. Peace is with us now nearly always; war is with us rarely, yet we are told that it is the qualities of war which will survive, and the qualities of peace which will be subsidiary.
I am not forgetting, of course, the military training, the barrack life which is to keep alive the military tradition. I have dealt with that question in the next chapter. It suffices for the moment to note that that training is defended on the grounds (notably among those who would introduce it into England)—(1) that it ensures peace; (2) that it renders a population more efficient in the arts of peace—that is to say, perpetuates that condition of "slothful ease" which we are told is so dangerous to our characters, in which we are bound to lose the "warlike qualities," and which renders society still more "gourmandizing" in Mr. Lea's contemptuous phrase, still more "Cobdenite" in Mr. Leo Maxse's. One cannot have it both ways. If long-continued peace is enervating, it is mere self-stultification to plead for conscription on the ground that it will still further prolong that enervating condition. If Mr. Leo Maxse sneers at industrial society and the peace ideal—"the Cobdenite ideal of buying cheap and selling dear"—he must not defend German conscription (though he does) on the ground that it renders German commerce more efficient—that, in other words, it advances that "Cobdenite ideal." In that case, the drift away from war will be stronger than ever. Perhaps some of all this inconsistency was in Mr. Roosevelt's mind when he declared that by "war alone" can man develop those manly qualities, etc. If conscription really does prolong peace and increase our aptitude for the arts of peace, then conscription itself is but a factor in man's temperamental drift away from war, in the change of his nature towards peace.
It is not because man is degenerate or swinish or gluttonous (such language, indeed, applied as it is by Mr. Lea to the larger and better part of the human race, suggests a not very high-minded ill-temper at the stubbornness of facts which rhetoric does not affect) that he is showing less and less disposition to fight, but because he is condemned by the real "primordial law" to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, and his nature in consequence develops those qualities which the bulk of his interests and capacities demand and favor.
Finally, of course, we are told that even though these forces are at work, they must take "thousands of years" to operate. This dogmatism ignores the Law of Acceleration, as true in the domain of sociology as in that of physics, which I have touched on at the close of the preceding chapter. The most recent evidence would seem to show that man as a fire-using animal dates back to the Tertiary epoch—say, three hundred thousand years. Now, in all that touches this discussion, man in Northern Europe (in Great Britain, say) remained unchanged for two hundred and ninety-eight thousand of those years. In the last two thousand years he changed more than in the two hundred and ninety-eight thousand preceding, and in one hundred he has changed more, perhaps, than in the preceding two thousand. The comparison becomes more understandable if we resolve it into hours. For, say, fifty years the man was a cannibal savage or a wild animal, hunting other wild animals, and then in the space of three months he became John Smith of Des Moines, attending church, passing laws, using the telephone, and so on. That is the history of European mankind. And in the face of it, the wiseacres talk sapiently, and lay it down as a self-evident and demonstrable fact that inter-State war, which, by reason of the mechanics of our civilization, accomplishes nothing and can 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."