is such, they continue, that we can get from it on these terms work such as that of the soldier’s, which is work in its most terrifying form, it stands to reason that we can, on the same terms, get out of it work of a much easier kind, such as that of exceptional business ability applied to the safe and peaceful direction of labour.  Nor is this argument urged by socialists only.  Other thinkers who, though resembling them somewhat in sentiment, are wholly opposed to socialism as a formal creed, have likewise pitched upon the soldier’s conduct in war as a signal illustration of the potentialities of human nature in peace.  Thus Ruskin says that his whole scheme of political economy is based on the moral assimilation of industrial action to military.  “Soldiers of the ploughshare,” he exclaims in one of his works, “as well as soldiers of the sword!  All my political economy is comprehended in that phrase.”  So, too, Mr. Frederic Harrison, the English prophet of Positivism, following out the same train of thought, has declared that the soldier’s readiness to die in battle for his country is a realised example of a readiness, always latent in men, to spend themselves and be spent in the service of humanity generally.  Again in the same sense, another writer observes, “The soldier’s subsistence is certain.  It does not depend on his exertions.  At once he becomes susceptible to appeals to his patriotism, and he will value a bit of bronze, which is the reward of valour, far more than a hundred times its weight in gold”—­a passage to which one of Mr. Sidney Webb’s collaborators refers with special delight, exclaiming, “Let those take notice of this last fact who fancy we must wait till men are angels before socialism is practical.”

Now, the arguments thus drawn from the facts of military activity throw a special light on the methods and mental condition of those who so solemnly urge them; for the error by which these arguments are vitiated is of a peculiarly glaring kind.  It consists of a failure to perceive that military activity is, in many respects, a thing altogether apart, and depends on psychological and physiological conditions which have no analogies in the domain of ordinary economic effort.

That such must necessarily be the case can be very easily seen by following out the train of reasoning suggested by Mr. Frederic Harrison.  Mr. Harrison correctly assumes that no man, in ordinary life, will run the risk of being killed or mutilated except for the sake of some object the achievement of which is profoundly desired by him.  If a man, for instance, puts his hand into the fire in order to pick out something that has dropped among the burning coals, we naturally assume that this something is of the utmost value and importance to him.  We measure the value which a man places on the object by the desperate character of the means which he will take to gain it; and Mr. Harrison jumps to the conclusion that what holds good in ordinary life will hold equally good on the field