Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/793

Rh held at the service of the society. This universal service, this combination, and this merging of individual claims, presuppose a despotic controlling agency. That the will of the soldier-chief may be operative when the aggregate is large, there must be sub-centers and sub sub-centers in descending grades, through whom orders may be conveyed and enforced, both throughout the combatant part and the noncombatant part. As the commander tells the soldier both what he shall not do and what he shall do, so, throughout the militant community at large, the rule is both negatively regulative and positively regulative: it not only restrains, but it directs: the citizen as well as the soldier lives under a system of compulsory coöperation. Development of the militant type involves increasing rigidity, since the cohesion, the combination, the subordination, and the regulation, to which the units of a society are subjected by it, inevitably decrease their ability to change their social positions, their occupations, their localities.

On inspecting sundry societies, past and present, large and small, which are, or have been, characterized in high degrees by militancy, we are shown, a posteriori, that amid the differences due to race, to circumstances, and to degrees of development, there are fundamental similarities of the kinds above inferred a priori. Modern Dahomey and Russia, as well as ancient Peru, Egypt, and Sparta, exemplify that owning of the individual by the state in life, liberty, and goods, which is proper to a social system adapted for war. And, that, with changes further fitting a society for warlike activities, there spread throughout it an officialism, a dictation, and a superintendence, akin to those under which the soldiery lives, we are shown by imperial Rome, by imperial Germany, and by England since its late aggressive activities.

Lastly comes the evidence furnished by the adapted characters of the men who compose militant societies. Making success in war the highest glory, they are led to identify goodness with bravery and strength. Revenge becomes a sacred duty with them; and, acting at home on the law of retaliation which they act on abroad, they similarly at home as abroad are ready to sacrifice others to self: their sympathies, continually deadened in war, can not be active during peace. They must have a patriotism which regards the triumph of their society as the supreme end of the action; they must possess the loyalty whence flows obedience to authority; and that they may be obedient they must have abundant faith. With faith in authority and consequent readiness to be directed, naturally goes relatively little power of initiation. The habit of seeing everything officially controlled fosters the belief that official control is everywhere needful; and a course of life which makes personal causation familiar and negatives experience of impersonal causation produces an inability to conceive of any social processes as carried on under self-regulating