Page:The War and the Future (Masefield, 1918).djvu/66

54 these ways of life, if persisted in by any nation for three or four generations, intensify themselves, till, in the military state there is too much control and in the civilian state too little.

In the civilian state, where much is left to the individual, much is left undone. Many individuals grow up to be highly educated, pleasant and agreeable men, but more grow up with the feeling that there is nothing to stop them from exploiting their fellow citizens, and this they do quite as ruthlessly as any soldier, and with far less recompense. The soldier may drive his men, but he feeds, clothes and pensions them. The civilian may drive his men and scrap them as old tools when he has broken them. Very soon, in the civilian state, individualism comes to a point in which the service of the State is left to those who care for that kind of thing. Those who do care for that kind of thing find that the fear of interference with liberty, which is the main passion in a civilian state, has prevented them from having any power. They can do neither good nor evil, and so they stagnate. They cease to attract the finer and more active kinds of mind. So that in a civilian state though you may find culture, politeness, niceness of feeling,