the cradle of many generations. It is not an accident that military toys are given to children during the most plastic and favorably formative period of life. Inflammable youth is fed upon an inflammable diet morning, noon and night; at no time can his ears, eyes or touch escape those environmental stimuli which fall upon and make permanent his native tendency to combat, to resent, to hate. Out of this stuff European nations wove and are continuing to weave the ideational web of war. The gory field of Europe is the inevitable consequence. So sure as martial ideas are fabricated, so sure as these ideas are persistently entertained, so sure will war result, for it is the very essence of ideas to issue into action.
If it is true that environmental stimuli quicken and actualize latent tendencies and if it is equally true that failure to feed such tendencies during the ripening period tends to weaken, if not eradicate, them, then, the good John Galsworthy’s statement that “this war is an operation to excise the trampling instinct” is surely open to serious question. According to the laws of instinctive development, fixation of the trampling instinct rather than excision is the inevitable consequence of the war. The iron heel of the treading, trampling instinct thrives least through inaction and is quickened, sharpened and enthroned by action in a favorable environment. War is such an environment; it unlocks the trampling heel of the dominating, professional Junker aa a key loosens the lock. Junkerism resides within the breast of every man in every land and differs from mortal to mortal only in the degree of its original vigor. Excision through opportunity is a myth born of flimsier stuff than paper dreams.
Again let it be said that the question of national security can not fail to consider man’s dual and original endowments. Peel off the thin veneer of conventionality, and tap him at his foundation, and one side of him stands revealed as a fighter, full of original pugnacity, anger, resentment and, under provocation, may become the most ruthlessly ferocious of beasts. These “Original Movers” fitted man to survive and are operative to-day under one guise or another. As Rochefoucauld says,
There is something in the misfortunes of our very friends that does not altogether displease us; and an apostle of peace will feel a certain vicious thrill run through him, and enjoy a vicarious brutality, as he turns to the column in his newspaper at the top of which “Shocking Atrocity” stands printed in large letters. See how the crowds flock round a street brawl! Consider the enormous annual sale of revolvers to persons, not one in a thousand of whom has any serious intention of using them, but of whom each one has his carnivorous self-consciousness agreeably tickled by the notion, as he clutches the handle of his weapon, that he will be rather a dangerous customer to meet![1]
- ↑ James: “Principles of Psychology.”
