till new seeds are at hand, and he hopes that the state will last yet a good while, and that destructive attacks on it by hasty, half-educated people will be averted.[1] The reason for his relatively low estimate of it is, on the one hand, that the ends it serves (security and comfort) are lesser ends in life, and, on the other, that it none the less wishes to call the highest talents to its aid. Mind ought to be free for other things. "Our age that talks so much of economy is a spendthrift: it wastes what is most precious, mind."[2] It is the business people particularly who want the state, and it is they, with their philosophy, who are ruling the world now—artists, scholars, even religion following in their train.[3] i
He gives much attention to war—a state-phenomenon. He knows its uses in the past, is far from absolutely condemning it, admits that it may have uses in the future—there is one aphorism with the extravagant title, "War Indispensable."[4] It is a remedy, he thinks, for peoples growing languid and miserable—a remedy, that is, supposing that they really want to live—a sort of brutal cure.[5] It is a return to barbarism, but also to barbaric strength, a kind of hibernating time for culture, out of which one issues stronger both for good and for evil.[6] It may also be a good to a commercialized people, too fond of security and ease.[7] On the other hand, a people living full and strong has no need of war.[8] Its effect is to make the victors stupid and the vanquished malicious.[9] The military system not only involves enormous expense, but, what is worse, it takes the strongest, most capable men in extraordinary numbers away from their proper occupations, to make them soldiers.[10] After drawing a vivid detailed picture of the various inequities and stupidities in military life, he sets down the modern military system as an anachronism, a survival, having for the wheels of present-day society only the value of a drag or brake (i.e., in
