of battle also.  Hence he argues—­for this is his special point—­that the willingness of the soldier to die fighting on behalf of his country shows how individuals of no unusual kind value their country’s welfare more than their own lives, and how readily, such being the case, devotion to a particular country may be enlarged into a religious devotion to Humanity taken as a whole.  Now, there are occasions, no doubt, in which, a country being in desperate straits, the soldier’s valour is heightened by devotion to the cause he fights for; but that ideal devotion like this affords no sufficient explanation of the peculiar character of military activity generally; and that there must be some deeper and more general cause at the back of it, is shown by the fact that some of the most reckless soldiers known to us have been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for another.  And this deeper and more general cause, when we look for it, is sufficiently obvious.  It consists of the fact that, owing to the millions of years of struggle to which was due, in the first place, the evolution of man as a species, and, in the second place, the races of men in their existing stages of civilisation, the fighting instinct is, in the strongest of these races, inherent after a fashion in which the industrial instincts are not; and will always prompt numbers to do, for the smallest wage or none, what they could hardly, in its absence, be induced to do for the highest.  This instinct, no doubt, is more controlled than formerly, and is not so often roused; but it is still there.  It is ready to quicken at the mere sound of military music; and the sight of regiments marching stirs the most apathetic crowd.  High-spirited boys will, for the mere pleasure of fighting, run the risk of having their noses broken, while they will wince at getting up in the cold for the sake of learning their lessons, and would certainly rebel against being set to work as wage-earners at a task which involved so much as a daily pricking of their fingers.

Here we have the reason, embodied in the very organism of the human being, why military activity is something essentially distinct from industrial, and why any inference drawn from the one to the other is valueless.  And to this primary fact it is necessary to add another.  Not only is the fighting instinct an exceptional phenomenon in man, but the circumstances which call it into being are in these days exceptional also.  Socialists frequently, when referring to the soldier’s conduct, refer also to conduct of a closely allied kind, such as that of the members of fire-brigades and the crews of life-boats, and repeat their previous question of why, since men like these will, without demanding any exceptional reward, make such exceptional efforts to save the lives of others, the monopolists of business ability may not be reasonably expected to forgo all exceptional claims on their own exceptional products, and distribute among all the superfluous wealth produced