Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/104

 which was Armageddon—seems usually to have sapped the masculine strength.

The extreme militarist declares that the highest civic duty of man is the advancement of the power and glory of his race or nation; nothing else really counts. He is confounded out of his own mouth. In the long story of races, what doth it profit a nation if during two or three generations she rules a world-circling empire as Spain did in the seventeenth century, and then sinks back exhausted and impotent as Spain did in the nineteenth? Does that make for the power and glory of the race? Yet biologic law seems to ordain that the sharp sword of the warlike nation cuts both ways; and when we intensify nature with modern science, the matter gets beyond seeming. In the idea that by war he advances the power and the ultimate glory of his race, the militarist is again mistaking appearances for reality.