Nearly every State in
the world demands from youth a couple of years' service in the army.
There they are trained to defend their country--even, if necessary, to
slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to the
imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble body
of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to solve
national differences by reason rather than by force. But we all
recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the
community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to
the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to
surrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a race
does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of
high character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity
attaches to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the
slopes of death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no
delirious mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk
of having its own dirty skin perforated by bullets.
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