glorious as it is hideous. Not a day passed during more than four terrible years, but what we read with tingling hearts how brave men suffered without complaint, and died without fear, for the countries that they loved. I remember, for example, reading on a certain day in 1916, in a single copy of an evening newspaper, of three young soldiers who were heroes. One was a German lad, unnamed, who was found stricken unto death by the side of a dead Englishman, whose wounds he had tried to staunch, and whose thirst he had quenched from the water of his own canteen—a second Sir Philip Sidney, nobler than the first, since he gave succor not to a friend but to an enemy. The second man was an Englishman, Capt. Alexander Seaton, who fell fighting bravely at the Dardanelles. A classical scholar of repute, a fellow in Pembroke College, Cambridge, devoted to his work as a tutor and lecturer in history, it was written of him, by one who knew and loved him, "Not a soldier by inclination, he left his peaceful life at Pembroke solely because he conceived that his duty lay that way, and that the hour had come for every man to strike a blow for his country." The third man was a Frenchman, a poet, Ernest Psichari by name, who fell at Verton, in Belgium. "His battery had been ordered to keep the enemy in check while the army was falling back," ran the story. "They were expected to hold their ground for a few hours, and they did so for a whole day; and when the last shell had been spent, officers and gunners were killed to a man on the guns they had taken care to render unusable."

Such are the stories which came to us through the period of the Great War. All of them are eloquent of the fact, are they not, that the instinct of humanity is right in its ascription of heroism to the soldier? If this instinct has gone astray, it is only in the tendency which it has shown to ascribe heroism exclusively to the soldier. In attempting to do full justice to the man who has fought and died amid the terrors of the battlefield, it has been tempted again and again to do something less than justice to the man who has fought and died as gallantly in fields less dramatic but no less terrible than those of war. For whether we judge heroism as involving contempt of comfort, hazard of death, or the simple eager quest for fullness of life, we find it, I believe, even more truly, though less frequently, characteristic of the circumstances of peace than those of war. It was upon this plain fact that William James sought to vindicate the possibility of what he called, in his famous essay of that title, "a moral equivalent of war." He affirmed that "the war party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues are absolute and permanent human goods." But, he continues, "patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form"; nor, we may add, its only present form. "It would be simply preposterous," says James again, "if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or Japanese. Great indeed is fear, but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper." And it is here that James urges, as his "moral equivalent of war," the conscription of our young men "to coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, to the frames of sky-scrapers," there to pay "their blood-tax—in the immemorial human warfare against nature." All of which means, among other things, that those men and women today who are already mining coal, and washing dishes, and making tunnels, and stoking furnaces, and building sky-scrapers, are already heroes, trained like the soldier to "the military ideals of hardihood and discipline!"

There is a heroism of peace comparable in every way to the heroism of war. Nay, we would go further and say that there is a heroism of peace superior in many ways to the heroism of war. The true soldier, as we have seen, is necessarily a hero; but the true hero is by no means necessarily a soldier. On the contrary, there have been thousands of men who have ascended to heights of heroic endeavor and achievement, to which the soldier from the very nature of his profession has never been able to attain. Emerson declares in his great essay that the heroism of war is heroism in "its rudest form." May we not also say, perhaps, that heroism of war is heroism in its easiest and therefore least extraordinary form? For there are certain circumstances surrounding the conduct of campaigns and the fighting of battles, which make heroism as simple and natural as, under other circumstances, it is difficult and unnatural. I am even tempted to go so far as to assert that a man can be a hero in war and still be a coward at heart. He can at least meet the test of heroism amid the fury of armed combat, with some degree of success, when he would crumple up before this test, like a rotten lance against a shield, under every other condition. Indeed, we have only to strip away the trappings, the artificial characteristics of militarism, in order to see how the heroism produced by war, even at its highest and best, is of an inferior type, as compared with the purer and nobler type of heroism produced by the ordinary and therefore more moral experience of peace. From this point of view, it seems to me that there are at least three circumstances, altogether peculiar to warfare, which make the heroism of the soldier to be easy, and therefore of a type distinctly lower than that manifested by men in other, more commonplace, less dramatic, but no less terrific crises of experience.

In the first place, let me point out that there is a pageantry about war, which makes even the meanest heart to beat with a deeper throb and thus feel a loftier courage than is its wont. There are the uniforms in which the soldiers are clad, the gleaming swords and rifles which they carry, the brilliant flags which flutter over their heads, the crashing music which marks the time for their marching feet. Everywhere, in camp, on the march, on the battlefield, there is color, glitter, glory, beauty of sight and sound, the whole paraphernalia of "pomp and circumstance." And all this has the inevitable effect of making it easy for the ordinary man to forget his fears and throw himself like a hero into the stress and strain of combat. Even those who hate war the worst and are therefore subject the least to its artificial glamor are swept away in spite of themselves. Richard Le Gallienne has written of this very experience in his famous poem, The Illusion of War. He starts out by confessing that he abhors war. "And yet," he says, "How sweet

And he continues—