Perhaps most men are immoral if they get the chance.  Most soldiers are immoral if they get the chance.  But those who are trying to help the soldier can do so with a good heart if they realize that in him they have a foundation on which to build.  Already he is half a hero-worshipper.  Already he half believes in the beauty of sacrifice and in the life immortal.  Already he is predisposed to value exceedingly all that savours of clean, wholesome home life.  On that foundation it should be possible to build a strong idealism which shall prevail against the flesh.  And this is my last word—­it is by building up, and not by casting down, that the soldier can be saved from degradation.  The devil that possesses so many can only be cast out by an angel that is stronger than he.

III

THE GOOD SIDE OF “MILITARISM”

I had a letter the other day from an Oxford friend.  In it was this phrase:  “I loathe militarism in all its forms.”  Somehow it took me back quite suddenly to the days before the war, to ideas that I had almost completely forgotten.  I suppose that in those days the great feature of those of us who tried to be “in the forefront of modern thought” was their riotous egotism, their anarchical insistence on the claims of the individual at the expense even of law, order, society, and convention.  “Self-realization” we considered to be the primary duty of every man and woman.

The wife who left her husband, children, and home because of her passion for another man was a heroine, braving the hypocritical judgments of society to assert the claims of the individual soul.  The woman who refused to abandon all for love’s sake, was not only a coward but a criminal, guilty of the deadly sin of sacrificing her soul, committing it to a prison where it would languish and never blossom to its full perfection.  The man who was bound to uncongenial drudgery by the chains of an early marriage or aged parents dependent on him, was the victim of a tragedy which drew tears from our eyes.  The woman who neglected her home because she needed a “wider sphere” in which to develop her personality was a champion of women’s rights, a pioneer of enlightenment.  And, on the other hand, the people who went on making the best of uncongenial drudgery, or in any way subjected their individualities to what old-fashioned people called duty, were in our eyes contemptible poltroons.

It was the same in politics and religion.  To be loyal to a party or obedient to a Church was to stand self-confessed a fool or a hypocrite.  Self-realization, that was in our eyes the whole duty of man.