The Flaw In The Jewel

The corner-stone of the democratic concept is the belief that the State was made for Man, not Man for the State. It is because Communist imperialism can only exist by insisting upon the exact opposite that any rapprochement engineered between the countries where its rule prevails and those of the free world, can never be anything but brittle, wary, and questionably enduring.

With the Western peoples confused at the moment by developments in Europe and in the Near East, it is salutary to recall that Lenin repeatedly affirmed, “So long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace.” That assertion embodies an implication of policy which no Russian leader, to date, has categorically repudiated. Nor is reason for such temporizing far to seek.

Communism is an arbitrary form of government imposed upon the community; it is a tyranny that can function only under the control of a single party, employing ruthless suppression, intimidation, organized poverty, and a secret police. Democracy, on the other hand, is a system of governance in which the community consents, confident that its fundamental liberties will be preserved by the safeguards embodied in the multi-party device and a protective Constitution as concerned for the rights of the individual as with control of the mass. Between such antipathetical means of maintaining the needful degree of authority, it would be idle to seek for a common denominator.

On the other hand, it would be dangerous in the extreme to encourage the notion— already far too prevalent—that democracy is purely a one way “trade.” However unbounded the liberty of the subject and the freedom from State-enjoined thralldom enjoyed by the individual, there are certain ineludible duties and obligations he owes to the community. They are services that cannot be shirked if that community (including the individual himself) is to maintain its chosen way of life free from extraneous threat or warlike assault.

The primordial tribal group, from which the structure of the present-day democratic state derives, was simply an aggregation of individuals banded together on the assumption that each and every one of them would be ready to defend the particular mode of existence to which one and all subscribed. Invasion of the hunting grounds and settlements the community had come to look upon as its own brought every tribesman unhesitatingly to the defense of all that was held in common; since individual possessions, including life and liberty, could only be preserved by co-operative effort.

Personal service in the interest of the community was, therefore, a boon that no one ever thought of withholding; and by medieval times the pattern of obligation had become standardized under an hereditary national leader—the Sovereign. This erstwhile tribal chieftain—the elected “man on the shield”—-was sublimated and endowed with the divine right of temporal rulership by a priesthood that was careful to retain intact its overriding spiritual authority.

This dual source of power combined to exact fulfillment of the obligations, both mundane and ecclesiastical, the individual owed to his fellows, the prime of which was armed service in the country’s cause. Knight service was rendered to the Sovereign, as head of the nation, in return for the enjoyment of land tenure; the lesser sub-tenant fought in his overlord’s train on similar terms. It was a system which enjoyed the Church’s fullest endorsement and support, and it occurred to no one to question its validity.

The decline of medievalism and the waning authority of the Church in secular—and therefore in military¹—matters which characterized the years immediately following the Reformation (circa 1532-36 A.D.) had the effect of radically reorienting the individual’s response to what had now become a traditional obligation. He no longer took up arms out of personal fealty to a regal leader, but by virtue of a general sense of loyalty to the land and the way of life for which it stood. A growing consciousness of nationalism bred a sturdy sense of patriotism, a love of country and all it represented so ardent and self-abnegating that the free man deemed it an obligation of honor voluntarily to risk life and limb to ensure its preservation. So great, indeed, was the exalted spirit of service by which the individual was inspired that the Elizabethan captain, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, writing without affectation or swaggering bravura, could solemnly affirm:

“Give me leave without offense always to live and die in this mind—that he is not worthy to live at all who in fear of danger or death shunneth his country’s service and his own honour; seeing that death is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal.”²

It was the pick of such men who in due course formed the elite of the standing forces it had become prudent to maintain, now that warfare had waxed too complicated for its practice to be tacked on as a mere appendage of the everyday life of the citizen. Such stalwarts as these furnished the hard core of professional fighting-men, at sea and on the land, their ranks being amplified on occasion by certain “gentlemen of the company.” Volunteers such as these were cadets of gentle birth, reasonably skilled in arms, and prepared to make the campaign in the ranks as an obligation of honor, as part of their general education, and perhaps in the latent hope of improving their fortunes by the acquisition of a little profitable booty. Volunteer “gentleman venturers” also formed part of the ship’s company under such Elizabethan captains as Drake, Hawkyns, Raleigh, and Frobisher. None the less, in times of widespread and prolonged emergency the only course was to resort to a levee en masse, a measure for the conscription of man-power, medieval in origin, that did not stop short of outright impressment.³

The first half of the 17th century, however, was characterized by very considerable changes in the English people’s social structure, the most notable of which was the emergence of a new and rapidly increasing mercantile class. As industrious as they were congenitally cantankerous, they were dourly puritan of habit and bitterly anti-royalist in sentiment. Holding the beliefs they did, it was inevitable that they should be strongly opposed to anything in the nature of standing forces, which they regarded as little more than the potential instruments of monarchichal tyranny. Thus despite the immunity from hostile interference the sailor and soldier ensured for his Calvinistic traducers—to say nothing of the protection afforded their profitable maritime commerce—a contemporary writer would record, “Such as have followed the wars are despised of every man until a very pinch of need doth come.”

The age of chivalry, wherein the fighting- man’s lofty aim had been “to unite the force and fire of the ancient warrior with something of the tenderness and humility of the Christian saint,” had long since ended; patriotism was suspect; the man with the sword on his thigh had come to be regarded as little more than a blustering professional hired assassin.

This curdling dislike and distrust of the fighting-man was destined to persist and deepen; and its continuance into the present day gravely affects the world situation by which both English-speaking democracies find themselves confronted. For a prejudice at one time wholly indigenous to England found fertile soil in which to flourish across the Atlantic. Those voluntary expatriates of English birth who earlier had fled persecution on their native shores, to settle in North America, took with them an equal loathing of what they were pleased to term the “armed minions of oppression.” It was a blind, insensate prepossession which in later years added appreciably to the difficulties confronting the Colonial authorities in their task of organizing a fighting force to uphold the cause of independence. From the outset there were far too many volunteers to quibble about whether their engagement was for the calendar or the lunar month; far too many Minute Men who enlisted one minute and endowed themselves with indefinite leave of absence the next; far too many particularists prepared to march away from the scene of action just when victory was within their grasp because, forsooth, their period of service had technically come to an end—a consideration which hastened Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in the December of 1776.

If such was the poverty of spirit evinced by some of those who took up arms, it is little to be wondered at that certain elements amongst the civilian population should have exhibited neither gratitude nor common consideration for those who had fought and striven manfully in a cause that was common to them all. “A uniform coat and a cocked hat,” Colonel Michael Jackson wrote bitterly to General Knox, “are sufficient reasons for the inhabitants why they will not assist or relieve the soldier’s distresses.”

In such sour and sterile soil as this, it is uphill work for the military virtues to take root and flourish. It was extremely difficult, therefore, for the heirs of the Revolution to assimilate the fact that if liberty has to be fought for in the first place, when at last it has been won, it becomes the plain duty of every fit man who has the enjoyment of it to serve faithfully as its guardian.

In plain terms, over the centuries the warrior class had lost caste. The “lewd and licentious soldier” was dismissed as “a poor, profligate wretch,” while the mariner was held in such contemptuous regard that Dr. Johnson could cynically comment, “No man will be a sailor who has the contrivance to get himself in jail, for being in a ship is being in jail, with a chance of being drowned.”

Small wonder that men were hesitant to seek a career in the Services, where the contempt with which they were regarded was not even compensated by the petty, mundane rewards their arduous duties brought them.

One of the most disastrous reactions attributable to the girding mistrust of the fighting forces, common alike to parsimonious administrations and a grudging public, has been the invariable tendency to signalize victory over an enemy by over-precipitate demobilization.

At the time of the Treaty of Ryswick of 1697, for example, England’s William III had at his disposal a seasoned army of 87,000 officers and men. Yet the ink was hardly dry on the pact terminating hostilities before Parliament refused to vote supplies for more than 7,000 troops; while the bulk of the seamen were set adrift and the best of the ships laid up in ordinary to rot. And in a few years, all was to do again.

Yet the same phrenetic urge to dissipate the armed forces upon which external security depended was even more assertive in the newly-created United States. In the January of 1784 the nation’s army totalled a mere 700 rank and file. Even so, fanatic antimilitarists insisted that such a force was “inconsistent with the principles of republican government and dangerous to the liberties of a free people.” Wilfully unheedful of the fact that fledgling republics no less then ancient monarchies are open to outside assault, this obstruent clique succeeded in reducing what was already a pitifully inadequate force to a single company, capable only of furnishing a detachment of 25 men to Fort Pitt and another of 55 to West Point.⁴  In 1786 the Continental Navy went out of business altogether, selling its last remaining vessel for conversion into a merchantman.⁵ And this with the war clouds piling up over three continents!

By 1793, three thousand miles away in England, so low had the country’s military resources been allowed to fall that the twenty- year struggle with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France was inaugurated by an expeditionary force boasting the grand total of 1,800 of all ranks. It was only by virtue of the scare thrown into it by the French fleet during the War of Independence that the British Navy found itself in better shape to face up to the contest.

With the turn of the century, the writing was on the wall for all to read. But those in the United States responsible for the conduct of public affairs failed dismally to decipher it. Thus it came about that in 1802 a Gallic army of 20,000 of the veterans of Hohenlinden, under General Leclerc, was at Santo Domingo ready and eager to stage an invasion of the North American mainland. At this moment it was defended by less than 3,500 regulars and a purely apocryphal force of untrained militia,⁶ most of the former being in garrison along the borderlands facing the ever-turbulent Indian country.⁷ To guard the coast and nip any invasion attempt in the bud, the Navy had only twelve frigates and sloops of war, a brig, and eight cutters.⁸ It was scarcely a force to take the sea against the squadrons from Lorient, Rochelle, and Toulon, numbering in all 32 ships of the line and 32 frigates, which had been concentrated by Admiral Villaret de Joyeuse. Indeed, but for the fact that within a few weeks “Yellow Jack” had swept off 18,000 of the would-be invaders, including Leclerc, America might well have found herself fighting another war of independence with her unpredictable ally of the earlier struggle.

If an administration is determined to maintain no more than a cadre of Regular forces in times of peace, it can only justify its course of action if at the same time it makes provision on an adequate scale for the upkeep of a large body of reserves, so trained and equipped as to be ready to respond instantly to any call on their services.

The fact that throughout the last three- quarters of the 19th century the two English-speaking democracies rarely gave this obligation adequate consideration must be attributed to the ability of their restricted sea and land forces to cope with such small wars as they had to contest. It is to be noted, however, that as the century drew to a close, numerically inadequate forces of United States and British regulars had to be supplemented by “hostilities only” contingents in the Spanish-American and Boer wars respectively. In neither instance had a body of trained reserves been available at the outset to reinforce the regulars; who found themselves confronted with forces that greatly outnumbered them—a state of affairs that the most powerful naval support could do little to alleviate. “We are never ready for war,” Field Marshal Lord Wolseley confided to his diary, “yet we never have a Cabinet who dare tell the people the truth.” But deadly dangerous characteristic as this may be, it cannot be held to be exclusive to the eastern shores of the Atlantic.

The repercussions of the Industrial Revolution and the comparable expansion of commerce in the United States, while laying yet greater emphasis on prehensile moneygetting, also witnessed a swing of the pendulum which elevated organized labor into the position of a Fourth Estate of the realm. This had a singularly depressive effect on the recruitment of the armed forces, which very largely had to make do with labor’s misfits and rejects. Yet, trained and encouraged by men for whom the Service way of life had proved a true metier, it could undoubtedly be said of these “sweepings of the street corners”—as Wellington had once said of his “scum of the earth intake”—that “it was really wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.” For all that, the common, everyday term “to run away for a sailor” defined with brutal clarity the furtive, clandestine manner in which the Sea-Service secured a large proportion of its hands. As for the land forces—in his later years one of the rank and file of Edwardian days has put it on record that, “It was commonly believed that any young man who joined the Army did so because he was too lazy to work, or else because he had got a girl in the family way. Hardly anyone had a good word for the soldier, and mothers taught their daughters to beware of them.”⁹ Kipling summed up the whole in his acid jingle;

“For its ‘Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Tommy go away,’

But its ‘Thank you Mister Atkins,’ when The bands begin to play.”

In America, the years that immediately followed the Civil War were characterized by complete stagnation in all matters concerning the Navy. In 1880 there were only 48 vessels, large and small, capable of giving fire; while Admiral Goodrich has recorded that, “A Captain was obliged to enter in the log book in red ink his reasons for getting up steam.”¹⁰ Even when new construction was at last put in hand, nothing more potent was envisaged than a few unarmored cruisers designed for commerce raiding. It was not until the days of Secretary Hunt, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, and Captain A. T. Mahan, that a real start was made “to convince the real masters of us all—the people as a whole—of the importance of a true understanding of naval needs.”¹¹

As for the Army, of roughly 3,000 officers and 50,000 enlisted men, it was scattered in small detachments in outlying posts, with little contact with a world which, in general, ignored it. “In consequence, a somewhat self-centered and certainly self-sufficient and self-contained Army and uninterested civilian population had no common bonds of interest.”¹² It says much for the exalted sense of service which animated them, that both sailor and soldier learned to accept their psychological insulation as cheerfully as they ignored the thinly-veiled contempt evoked by their resolute adhesion to an obviously non-profit-making career. Their reward lay in the knowledge that they alone could ensure the security that other men enjoyed.

With the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 it was obvious that the damnable concept of “total” war—first given recognition when the French Directory harnessed the whole resources of the nation to the conflict in 1795— was again to prevail. Fortunately, the British Navy had never been in better shape; while the American Fleet that went into action in 1917 had no cause to fear comparison with any other force afloat. But it was obvious from the first that the British Expeditionary Force of one cavalry and four infantry divisions¹³ would prove no more than a drop in the ocean in a contest that grimly promised to assume global proportions. One hundred thousand volunteers had eventually to be supported by men called up under a form of universal conscription.

From the outset the United States prepared for her entry into the war by the institution of a Draft Board; a measure which at least ensured a steady intake of recruits, although the regulars were despoiled of some of their very best human material to meet the heavy demand for instructors.

Conscription was already in operation in England when war broke out in 1939; while, late in 1940 in the United States the Draft Board once again kept the armed forces up to the required strength.

With traditional short-sightedness, however, the termination of hostilities, both in 1918 and 1945, was the signal on both sides of the Atlantic for an hysterical outcry to “Get the boys home.” Politically inexpedient to ignore or resist, the clamor brought prompt and fatally pliant acquiescence. For in both instances the consequences of playing to the gallery proved absolutely disastrous. In 1918, with no more than token forces of occupation, the Germans were free to hoodwink the Commission of Control to their hearts’ content; successfully camouflaging a forbidden General Staff; training unauthorized cadres of officers and N.C.O.’s, and blithely secreting unsurrendered arms by the million, including “Long Max,” the gun which had shelled Paris from a range of seventy-five miles. In 1945 the premature disbandment of the finest fighting forces the world has ever seen left the Russians free to engulf 763,840 square miles of alien territory, containing populations totalling 134,000,000, for which they could advance no scintilla of legal claim.

It was not until the galvanizing jolt of the Berlin blockade was followed by the Muscovite-inspired intervention of Chinese “volunteers” in Korea, that the stupendous menace of Communist imperialism was brought home to those Western democracies which invariably prefer pleonastic platitudes to dealing promptly with uncomfortable facts.

Both nations, and particularly the United States, with far the heavier commitment in Korea, were faced with the necessity of putting their respective military houses in order. Both confronted the same unyielding problem.

Briefly, it had to be accepted as axiomatic that in this present day and age, diplomacy is as strong—and as weak—as the armed force it can call to its immediate support. For should negotiations break down, no time- lag would intervene, under present conditions, between the outbreak of anything in the nature of a “total” war and the full fury of its impact. The race would be as much to the swift as to the strong.

It did not take long to realize that in this particular the Western democracies were— and largely remain—at a very serious disadvantage vis-à-vis the champions of Communist imperialism. For under the ruthless dictatorship imposed by the men in the Kremlin and in Peiping, the comfort and well-being of the community have been, and continue to be, consistently sacrificed on the altar of military preparedness. To ensure that the Soviet armed forces should at all times be ready to go instantly into action, food production has been remorselessly subordinated to heavy industry, while consumer goods have remained in perennial short supply.

Furthermore, the Muscovite worker has been dragooned into acceptance of a wage- scale twenty-five per cent lower than that pertaining in 1937-8, when pay-rates had admittedly shrunken to a level well beneath that prevailing in the Tsarist Russia of 1913.¹⁴ In effect, by debasing the living standard of the great mass of the people, and by this means only, the Russian satraps have been able to build up and maintain standing forces, fully equipped and armed, that far outnumber the combined military resources the Western Powers have at instant call. By much the same means, Mao Tse-Tung is harnessing Red China’s almost illimitable man-power to that policy of expansionism which forms, and will continue to form, the corner-stone of Communist ideology.

The Communist technique—a rhythm of snarls and threats alternating with back- slapping and delusive bonhomie—has only one purpose—the systematic destruction of the free nations of the West. In the furtherance of this grand design even hypocritical smiles are made to play their part. For as Dimitry Z. Manuilsky brazenly pronounced in 1930: “War to the hilt between Communism and Capitalism is inevitable. Today, of course, we are not strong enough to attack. Our time will come in twenty or thirty years. To win we shall need the element of surprise. The Bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep. So we shall begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. . . . The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to co-operate in their own destruction. They will leap at an other chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down we shall strike with our clenched fist.”

The eager cheers by which the Communist leaders have recently been greeted have yet to be earned. The Russians may leer for the moment, but as Khrushchev has been at pains to point out, “Anyone who mistakes our smile for a withdrawal from the policies of Marx and Lenin is making a sad mistake.” Quite so—“By their deeds shall ye know them.”

Until the near-millennium envisaged by wishful thinking actually materializes, it must remain no more than elementary wisdom to be governed by Washington’s wise dictum, that “the best way of preserving peace is to be prepared for war.” And precautionary measures for war obviously exclude plans for wholesale disarmament; which in itself cannot promote peace but can only be the outcome of it. As things stand, it would be nothing less than criminous folly not to legislate against an eventuality which is far less likely to occur if full preparation is made to meet it.

In any case the outlook, in some respects, is none too rosy. For if world conflict should supervene, the situation of the Western democracies would be rendered all the more hazardous by reason of their deliberate disclaimer of any intention of making the first move. This calculated—or miscalculated— rejection of the initiative makes a present of it to their opponents. With Russia and/or China free to strike the first blow, if they so wish, with greater immediately available strength than that possessed by the West, wistful reference to “massive retaliation” only serves to underline the sound military wisdom embodied in the venerable couplet:

Twice is he armed who hath his quarrel just,

And three times he who gets his blow in fust.

The condition of peril with which the crystallization of Communist intentions confronted—and, one may hazard, will continue to confront—the Western Powers was, and continues to be, susceptible to two remedies, and two remedies only. First, they could reduce the living standards of their respective countries to so starvecrow a level as to render it possible to maintain standing forces comparable in strength to those of Russia and her satellites and China. To pursue this course, however, would be to condemn the people of the West to the sacrifice of all the major amenities which are their pride and pleasure, and to commit them to a way of life no whit more tolerable than that endured, willy-nilly, by the unhappy victims of the Kremlin’s uncompromising diktat. For that matter, the very attempt to put such a process into operation would precipitate precisely that condition of misery and unrest which Moscow-trained agitators could foment into a successful Communist revolution. For Communism thrives on nothing so much as on destitution; and democracy can only outbid it if it continues actually to deliver the goods that its rival can do no more than mendaciously promise.

The second, and far better, method of grappling with the problem is to build, on a firm foundation of regular forces, a progressively expanding body of reserves, maintained in an advanced state of training and so organized as to be instantly available should “conventional” war follow hard on the heels or even take the place of “atomic” war; a contingency that cannot safely be disregarded.

That is the over-all plan the two English- speaking democracies have, in principle, adopted. But it would be ingenuous to the point of dangerous self-delusion to pretend that no cause for anxiety exists as to the degree of perfectibility with which the scheme is functioning.

In the United States—a republic, it has been said, in which the dollar is the uncrowned king—only the man with the real “fire in his belly” will contemplate devoting his whole life to a career which, in a mundane sense, can offer nothing better than a wage- scale consistently lower than that paid for comparable skill in commerce or industry, meliorated though his immediate prospects may be by the assurance of modest comfort on superannuation. In the circumstances it demands an exceptionally strong sense of duty to the community to ignore the hardeyed materialist’s paraphrase of Disraeli’s shoddy sneer, that “The Services in wartime are fit only for desperadoes, in peacetime fit only for fools.”

Men of such finely tempered quality exist at this present, of course; a magnificent hard core on which to build. The best men are in the Services, but even now there are not enough of them to go round. And it is highly questionable if the rising generation, in its present mood, can be looked to to produce first class replacements in adequate quantity to underwrite the future. For, as a recent contributor to the Proceedings gravely emphasized, “Even the Naval Academy seems to have lost its traditional appeal. Where one applicant in ten received an appointment before World War II, last year one in three became Plebes, in part because of the drop in applications.”¹⁵ Another correspondent has reported that certain young officers, on resigning their commissions, were heard to observe that: “We don’t think there is any future for the Navy—so we might as well pull clear now.”¹⁶ It seems never to have occurred to these young hopefuls that the future of any seaboard country is itself entirely dependent upon the possession of a powerful navy.

Where the ranks and ratings are concerned, the paucity of those prepared to enter upon, or renew, a regular engagement at the completion of their compulsory or volunteer service, tells its own unwelcome story.

When it comes to the reserves, a senior officer recently affirmed, in private, that “Although a lot of the Reserve Corps’ men admit that they thoroughly enjoy their periodical tours of duty with the active formations, nothing on earth would induce them to adopt the Navy or the Army as a life job; while a good many of the others are a great deal too half-hearted about their responsibilities.” Add to this the comment of the writer in the July, 1055 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, who averred that, “Because of the lack of participation of Ready Reservists in the Reserve Training program, compulsory reserve training is carefully being studied by the Department of Defense,” and it will be appreciated that there are real grounds for perturbation. For the whole conception of a reserve depends, not upon its passive acceptance, but upon its active support.

On the eastern side of the Atlantic, the Royal Navy is suffering a demonstrable phase of neglect in favor of the Royal Air Force, which has the effect, incidentally, of rendering the drop in officers and men seeking regular engagements far less noticeable than it would be were the Senior Service still regarded as the country’s first line of defense. It is to be noted thereafter that it has been found necessary to raise the age limit for officers of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a means of making good the general shortage of reservists by retaining men beyond the hitherto normal age limit for retirement.

With regard to the British regular land forces, a vast change has come over their composition owing to the radical diminution of wealth consequent on the staggering increase in taxation required to bolster up a “welfare” state—taxation which falls with particular rigor on the old officer-producing class of the community. In days gone by the out-of-pocket expenses borne by an officer in the execution of his duty were so heavy, and his honorarium so small, as to put him in the position of one who virtually rendered disinterested service. Nowadays, that type of individual has to scratch a living like everyone else; and although pay-rates have risen, he is far less inclined than of yore to seek it in the armed forces. Furthermore, bitter memories of the Administration’s many unredeemed promises have influenced many erstwhile officers rather to recommend a business career for their sons than service with the Army. And it would be more than naive to pretend that the loss of these scions of the old officer-producing class has been in every way made good. “I beseech you” Oliver Cromwell wrote to a subordinate, “be careful what Captains of Horse you choose, what sort of men are mounted. If you choose goodly, honest men for your Captains, honest men will follow them.” That is a council of perfection which, unfortunately, no longer applies. In these days the authorities have to make the best of what they can get. Officers apart, the flight of senior N.C.O.’s from the Army has been wellnigh catastrophic; while the number of men enlisted on a regular engagement fell from 50,000 in 1952 and 42,000 in 1953 to 34,000 in 1954.

The reserves, founded on a Territorial Army of part-time volunteers supplemented, more or less reluctantly, by those conscripts who have completed their two-year term with the colors, are extremely variable in quality, and in any case are not properly organized for modern war.

Dr. Johnson’s dictum, that “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea” would appear to have lost its pristine validity, a state of affairs which in the present uneasy posture of the world is very far from reassuring.

In bemoaning his own era of change, Edmund Burke went far towards defining our present-day malaise. “The age of chivalry has gone” he wrote, “that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded.” The democracies’ steadily rising tide of material prosperity has very little sympathy with anything incapable of yielding a tangible profit. It follows that for the average man service in any of the fighting formations has come to be regarded as a frivolous and unwarrantable interference with the dominant aim of progressing, if not literally from log cabin to White House, at least from dilapidated jalopy to the latest Cadillac. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” translated into the terms of a plutocratic, ruthlessly competitive democracy, has come all too widely to mean no more than the concentration of effort on the personal ideal of success in the rat-race for riches—no matter how many duodenal ulcers are acquired on the way. And of some of the winners, one can only “consider how their full coffers may hereafter make reparation for the empty catalogue of their virtues.” The man who makes a success in business does not always make a success of life.

America takes pride in the fact—and rightly—that it is a land of endless opportunity, offering a thousand short cuts to substantial wealth. Patriotism can dangle no such glittering prizes before the eyes of the covetous; for the armed forces can only be founded upon an impersonal ideal of service to the community; service in the peaceful preservation through armed strength of a particular way of life. For it should never be forgotten that the fighting-man is not the enemy of peace, but its watchful, ever- partial guardian.

It rarely occurs to the would-be tycoon that prosperity is based upon social security, and that there can be no such thing as social security until you have first made sure of national security.

It has also to be borne in mind that where the United States is concerned, the nation came into being as the outcome of successful resistance to authority; and Service life is founded upon discipline—authority in its most explicit form. Not that the present-day Britisher is any more docile when it comes to taking orders. Walt Whitman’s precept, ‘‘Resist much, obey little,” has found an all-too-ready welcome on the Atlantic’s eastern seaboard!

There has also to be taken into account the widespread but totally erroneous belief— the outcome of singularly ill-advised partisan propaganda—that any future war, however “total,” will make virtually no demand on the services of the Navy or the Army. Nothing more will be required, insists this specious protasis, than a few ingenious gadgets to discharge and control the new A- and H- weapons; plus a sprinkling of airmen lording it in the skies, immune from injury by virtue of the superior quality of their machines—a perfect example of the pushbutton addict’s inability to see the wood for the trees. All wars have been, and will continue to be, won by properly balanced forces. A single force can win nothing but publicity.

Furthermore, with both peoples, the old bitter prejudice against the “armed minions of tyranny” is still tenaciously persistent, and on a far wider scale than is generally credited; while the United States continues to harbor the demodi Jeffersonian “isolationist,” to whom the fightingman is no more than a costly redundancy.

But perhaps the most potent influence for the discouragement of willing service in the respective countries’ armed forces is that exerted by the womenfolk—and by “Mama” in particular. Naturally, every mother is convinced that in her son the world has been presented with a miracle. Without the aid of some such psychological defense-mechanism, she could never bear with all the tedious exactions and squalid demands that helpless infancy makes on her. The gravamen of complaint is that she continues to regard all her geese as swans, for whom especial exception to the rule can be claimed as a right. Since on this point all mothers think alike—I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier, with particular emphasis on the possessive pronoun—if they were to have their collective way (here would be no rule, only exceptions. The outcome of this refusal to relax the octopus-grip of maternal possessiveness, to cut the spiritual umbilical cord binding her boy to her is that in far too many instances he enters the Service psychologically preconditioned to resent his severance from the emasculating home influence to which his petulant insubordination, perversity, and deplorable want of moral fiber can indubitably be attributed. Such unfortunate youths as these are no more than caricatures of their own possibilities.

Time was when his mother proudly buckled on the spurs of knighthood her boy had newly won in combat. Time was when the women of the frontier, rather than seek to snatch the weapon from them, thrust the trusty Kentucky rifle into the sons’ hands and bade them stand shoulder to shoulder with their fathers in defense of their threatened homesteads. Time was when a brave- hearted woman, scanning the serried ranks of her kinsmen as they marched forth in battle array, could “read a fiery gospel in the burnished rows of steel.”

It was the gospel of a selfless, uncalculating, deep-rooted patriotism—not the hysterical patriotism that expresses itself in festoons of ticker tape on Wall Street or a bawling, empty-faced mob capering in front of Buckingham Palace, but the patriotism that gives without stint and looks for nothing in return but the consciousness of duty well and truly done. For “patriotism is not a song in the streets or a wreath on a monument, or a flag flying from a window. It is a thing very holy and terrible, like life itself. It is a burden to be borne, a thing to labor for and to suffer and to die for; a thing that gives scant happiness and no pleasantness, but a hard life . . . and the bowed heads of those that follow.”

If the sense of service and unblenching fortitude of spirit, which are the well-springs of patriotism, no longer quickens in our midst, then the Western world will abrogate the charter of its liberties by default. But such a thing is not to be believed. The spirit of the men of yesteryear, the men of Créçy and Trafalgar, of Lexington and Valley Forge, is merely dormant, awaiting the clarion call that will arouse it to new life. Sunk in a sort of nerveless apathy, overlaid by the hard callus of indifference, buried beneath the bony tissues of greed and habitual self-indulgence, and bemused by the saccharine catch-phrases of “welfare” and the spineless jargon of the sentimental humanist, upon its swift reanimation de* pends nothing less than the Western world’s survival.

In such a pass as this the hour has clearly struck for another and more magnetic Homer Lea, another Mahan, with the voice of a stentor and the fire of an inspired evangelist, to preach again the gospel of “militant patriotism in times of peace—so that times of war may be avoided.” The moment cannot be delayed for the democratic peoples to be brought to the realization that fear of war should never be allowed to triumph over the fear of an evil that war can avert.

Beyond and above all else, it must be rendered clear past any peradventure that service with the armed forces is not a trade or even a profession. It is something on a plane infinitely more lofty—an ennobling vocation to which a man can, and must, devote all the best that is in him. Consecrated to the most exacting, self-testing roles that servants of the State can be called upon to play, those who are privileged to bear arms in their country’s cause are “not on the roll of common men:”

“They shall be mine,” said the Lord of Hosts,

“In that day when I make up my jewels.”

Uplifted by the spirit of dedication and dignified by the sense of responsibility by which it is accompanied, their standing and prestige is rightly the envy of the lesser sort who have failed to qualify for the choice company of the elect.

For the age-old truth is still beyond challenge, that “The principal part of greatness in any State is to have a race of military men”; men not only practiced in arms but attuned in heart and mind to wield them should the moment come to defend all those ideals and standards of human conduct their country is under bond to cherish and preserve; “men who make some conscience of what they do, who know what they fight for, and love what they know.”

For such men as these danger alone can give life its full savor; since life itself can only be justified if it be freely adventured in a worthy cause. And theirs, as well they know, is the greatest cause in all the world—the cause of freedom.

On the morrow of his country’s glory a Greek soldier-philosopher solemnly averred that in a properly constituted State the terms warrior and citizen would be interchangeable. That was the far-ranging concept of which Alexander Hamilton in his turn became the impassioned advocate, and in which he persuaded Jefferson, his bitterest opponent, ultimately to assent.

When the people of the Western democracies learn to accept it and turn it into a living actuality, their freedom will no longer be in danger either from external menace or from internal decay.