But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the last half century.  I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is lethargy.  It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public education and to a thousand interferences with their private self-seeking.  Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men could be brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread of foreign violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic industrial production in order that men may be brought to subserve the growth of a State whose purpose might otherwise be too high for them to understand.  Men must be forced to care for fleets and armies until they have learnt to value cities and self development and a beautiful social life.

The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind that may set that machine in motion.  It is not that our guns and ships are marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations are haphazard growths entirely inferior to them.  If this present phase of civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds itself beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not be because we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but because we have failed to develop adequate powers of control for them and collective determination.  This panoply of war waits as the test of our progress towards the realization of that collective mind which I hold must ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being.  It is here to measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those defects to refer us back to our studies.

Just as we understand does war become needless.

But I do not think that war and military organization will so much disappear as change its nature as the years advance.  I think that the phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.

3.20.  Of abstinences and disciplines.

From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate things, to one’s self control, the regulation of one’s personal life.  And first about abstinences and disciplines.

I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that dislikes abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.