Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/150

 themselves to the drill-sergeant with fine, well-developed bodies. They knew how to keep themselves clean. They had been under the tight discipline of the modern world from the moment they opened a first reader—in school, in factory, in business. And after they left school, it was a kind of voluntary discipline making, it seems to me, for higher aims in character than any kind of involuntary discipline.

In the modern world as contrasted with the ancient we all live under strict discipline, partly self-imposed. Every morning, the reader gets up and goes at a set hour to his office or shop. No bugle wakes him; no sergeant barks out the order to fall in and go to work. If he grows weary of getting up at six or seven, he has only to quit his job. He will not be shot or jailed or publicly disgraced for that, as he would if he deserted from the army. To quit the job might hurt his career, might work privation on his family—that is all. Every morning after breakfast I sit down and write. Today, there is a dog-show in town. I want very much to go. I am not going, because I have too much work to do. So I hold myself to writing—voluntarily. Now both the reader and I are doing a thing, it seems to me, better for our mortal fibre than as though the bugle blew us out of bed and the sergeant, backed by the whole force of the United States government, ordered us to work. It is self-discipline, self-control, as contrasted with external discipline, external control. The modern world requires always more