The
organization they now belong to supports them and becomes their life.
By their union with it a new being is created. Exercise, drill,
maneuver, accentuate that unity, and esprit de corps arises, so that
they feel their highest life is the corporate one; and that feeling is
fostered continually, until at last all the units, by some law of the
soul, are as it were in spite of themselves, in spite of the legs which
want to run, in spite of the body which trembles with fear, constrained
to move in obedience to the purpose of the whole organism expressed by
its controlling will; and so we get these devoted masses of men who
advance again and again under a hail more terrible than Dante imagined
falling in his vision of the fiery world.
There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higher
minds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civic
ideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, "give their bodies
for the commonwealth," but will devote mind, will, and imagination with
equal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilization
which will be the inheritance of all and a cause of pride to every one,
and which will bring to the individual a greater beauty and richness of
life than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of which
he was capable.
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