THE MILITARY CASTE

Militarism is another of our maladies. Here we must distinguish with some
care. A military spirit is one thing: militarism is another. It is
probable that no nation is worthy to survive which does not possess a
military spirit, or, in other words, the instinct to defend itself and its
liberties against an aggressor. It is a virtue which is closely interfused
with high moral qualities--self-respect, a proper pride,
self-reliance--and is compatible with real modesty and sobriety of mind.
But militarism has nothing ethical about it. It is not courage, but sheer
pugnacity and quarrelsomeness, and as exemplified in our modern history it
means the dominion of a clique, the reign of a few self-opinionated
officials. That these individuals should possess only a limited
intelligence is almost inevitable. Existing for the purposes of war, they
naturally look at everything from an oblique and perverted point of view.
They regard nations, not as peaceful communities of citizens, but as
material to be worked up into armies. Their assumption is that war, being
an indelible feature in the history of our common humanity, must be
ceaselessly prepared for by the piling up of huge armaments and weapons of
destruction. Their invariable motto is that if you wish for peace you must
prepare for war--"si vis pacem, para bellum"--a notoriously false
apophthegm, because armaments are provocative, not soothing, and the man
who is a swash-buckler invites attack. It is needless to say that
thousands of military men do not belong to this category: no one dreads
war so much as the man who knows what it means. I am not speaking of
individuals, I am speaking of a particular caste, military officials in
the abstract, if you like to put it so, who, because their business is
war, have not the slightest idea what the pacific social development of a
people really means. Militarism is simply a one-sided, partial point of