The mainspring of the Roman army for centuries has been the patient strength and courage, capacity for enduring hardships, instinctive submission to military discipline of the population that lined the Apennines.
"The effect of the wars was that the ranks of the small farmers were decimated, while the number of slaves who did not serve in the army multiplied," says Professor Bury. Thus "Vir gave place to Homo," thus the mob filled Rome and the mob-hero rose to the imperial throne. No wonder that Constantine seemed greater than Augustus. No wonder that "if Tiberius chastised his subjects with whips, Valentinian chastised them with scorpions."[2]
[2] The point of this is that the cruel Tiberius was less severe on the Romans of his day than was the relatively benevolent Valentinian on his decadent people.
With Marcus Aurelius and the Antonines came a "period of sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge." Wars were conducted in the face of a declining birth-rate, and the decline in quality and quantity in the human breed engaged very early the attention of Roman statesmen. Deficiencies of numbers were made up by immigration, willing or enforced. Failure in quality was beyond remedy.
Says Professor Zumpt:
'Government having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty…. The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine. . . . The emperor possessed in the army an overwhelming force over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties. . . . There runs through Roman literature a brigand's and barbarian's contempt for honest industry. . . . Roman civilization was not a creative kind, it was military, that is, destructive.'
What was the end of it all? The nation bred Romans no more. To cultivate the Roman fields "whole tribes were borrowed." The man with quick eye and strong arm gave place to the slave, the scullion, the pariah, whose lot is fixed because in him there lies no power to alter it. So at last the Roman world, devoid of power to resist, was overwhelmed by the swarming Ostrogoths.
The barbarian settled and peopled the empire rather than conquered it. It was the weakness of war-worn Rome that gave the Germanic races their first opportunity.
"The nation is like a bee," wisely observes Bernard Shaw, "as it stings it dies."
In his monumental history of the "Downfall of the Ancient World" (Der Untergang der Antikenwelt) Dr. Otto Seeck of the University of Munster in Westphalia, treats in detail the causes of such decline. He first calls attention to the intellectual stagnation which came over the Roman Empire about the beginning of the Christian Era. This manifested itself in all fields of intellectual activity. No new idea of any importance was advanced in science nor in technical and political studies. In the realm of literature and art also one finds a complete lack of originality and a tendency to imitate older models. All this Seeck asserts, was brought about by the continuous "rooting out (Ausrottung) of the best"[3] through war.
[3] "Die Ausrottung der Besten, die jenen schwacheren Volken die Vernichtung brachte, hat die starken Germanen erst befahigt, auf den Trummern der antiken Welt neue dauerende Gemeinschaften zu errichten." Seeck.
Such extermination which took place in Greece as well as in Rome, was due to persistent internal conflicts, the constant murderous struggle going on between political parties, in which, in rapid succession, first one and then the other was victorious. The custom of the victors being to kill and banish the leaders and all prominent men in the defeated party, often destroying their children as well, it is evident that in time every strain distinguished for moral courage, initiative or intellectual strength was exterminated. By such a systematic killing off of men of initiative and brains, the intellectual level of a nation must necessarily be lowered more and more. In Rome as in Greece observes Seeck:
'A wealth of force of spirit went down in the suicidal wars. . . . In Rome, Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thousands. Sulla destroyed the democrats, and not less thoroughly. Whatever of strong blood survived, fell as an offering to the proscription of the Triumvirate. . . . The Romans had less of spontaneous force to lose than the Greeks. Thus desolation came sooner to them. Whoever was bold enough to rise politically in Rome was almost without exception thrown to the ground. ONLY COWARDS REMAINED, AND FROM THEIR BLOOD CAME FORWARD THE NEW GENERATIONS.[4] Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and in slavish following of masters and traditions.'
[4] Author's italics.
Certain authors, following Varro, have maintained that Rome died a "natural death," the normal result of old age. It is mere fancy to suppose that nations have their birth, their maturity and their decline under an inexorable law like that which determines the life history of the individual. A nation is a body of living men. It may be broken up if wrongly led or attacked by a superior force. When its proportion of men of initiative or character is reduced, its future will necessarily be a resultant of the forces that are left.
Dr. Seeck speaks with especial scorn of the idea that Rome died of "old age." He also repudiates the theory that her fall was due to the corruption of luxury, neglect of military tactics or over-diffusion of culture.
'It is inconceivable that the mass of Romans suffered from over-culture.[5] In condemning the sinful luxury of wealthy Romans we forget that the trade-lords of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were scarcely inferior in this regard to Lucullus and Apicius, their waste and luxury not constituting the slightest check to the advance of the nations to which these men belonged. The people who lived in luxury in Rome were scattered more thinly than in any modern state of Europe. The masses lived at all times more poorly and frugally because they could do nothing else. Can we conceive that a war force of untold millions of people is rendered effeminate by the luxury of a few hundreds? . . . Too long have historians looked on the rich and noble as marking the fate of the world. Half the Roman Empire was made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or Roman culture.
Whatever the remote and ultimate cause may have been, the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical, not a moral decay. In valor, discipline and science the Roman armies remained what they had always been, and the peasant emperors of Illyricum were worthy successors of Cincinnatus and Calus Marius. But the problem was, how to replenish those armies. Men were wanting. The empire perished for want of men.'
[5] "Damitsprechend hat man das Wort `Ueberkultur' uberhaupt erfunden, als wenn ein zu grosses Maass von Kultur uberhaupt denkbar ware."
In a volume entitled "Race or Mongrel" published as I write these pages, Dr. Alfred P. Schultz of New York, author of "The End of Darwinism," takes essentially the same series of facts as to the fall of Rome and draws from them a somewhat different conclusion. In his judgment the cause was due to "bastardy," to the mixing of Roman blood with that of neighboring and subjective races. To my mind, bastardy was the result and not the cause of Rome's decline, inferior and subject races having been sucked into Rome to fill the vacuum left as the Romans themselves perished in war. The continuous killing of the best left room for the "post-Roman herd," who once sold the imperial throne at auction to the highest bidder. As the Romans vanished through warfare at home and abroad, came an inrush of foreign blood from all regions roundabout. As Schultz graphically states:
'The degeneration and depravity of the mongrels was so great that they deified the emperors. And many of the emperors were of a character so vile that their deification proves that the post-Roman soul must have been more depraved than that of the Egyptian mongrel, who deified nothing lower than dogs, cats, crocodiles, bugs and vegetables.'
It must not be overlooked, however, that the Roman race was never a pure race. It was a union of strong elements of frontier democratic peoples, Sabines, Umbrians, Sicilians, Etruscans, Greeks, being blended in republican Rome. Whatever the origins, the worst outlived the best, mingling at last with the odds and ends of Imperial slavery, the "Sewage of Races" ("cloaca gentium") left at the Fall.
Gibbon says:
'This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies when the fierce giants of the north broke in and mended the puny breed. They restored the manly spirit of freedom and after the revolutions of ten centuries, freedom became the parent of taste and science.'
But again, the redeemed Italian was of no purer blood than the post-Roman-Ostrogoth ancestry from which he sprang. The "puny Roman" of the days of Theodoric owed his inheritance to the cross of Roman weaklings with Roman slaves. He was not weak because he was "mongrel" but because he sprang from bad stock on both sides. The Ostrogoth and the Lombard who tyrannized over him brought in a great strain of sterner stuff, followed by crosses with captive and slave such as always accompany conquest. To understand the fall of Rome one must consider the disastrous effects of crossings of this sort. Neither can one overlook the waste of war which made them inevitable through the wholesale influx of inferior tribes. Neither can one speak of the Roman, the Italian, the Spaniard, the French, the Roumanian, nor of any of the so-called "Latin" peoples as representing a simple pure stock, or as being, except in language, direct descendants of those ancient Latins who constituted the Roman Republic. The failure of Rome arose not from hybridization, but from the wretched quality on both sides of its mongrel stock, descendants of Romans unfit for war and of base immigrants that had filled the vacancies.
Greece.—Once Greece led the world in intellectual pursuits, in art, in poetry, in philosophy. A large and vital part of European culture is rooted directly in the language and thought of Athens. The most beautiful edifice in the world was the Peace Palace of the Parthenon, erected by Pericles, to celebrate the end of Greece's suicidal wars. This endured 2,187 years, to be wrecked at last (1687) in Turkish hands by the Christian bombs of the Venetian Republic.
But the glory of Greece had passed away long before the fall of the Parthenon. Its cause was the one cause of all such downfalls—the extinction of strong men by war. At the best, the civilization of Greece was built on slavery, one freeman to ten slaves. And when the freemen were destroyed, the slaves, an original Mediterranean stock, overspread the territory of Hellas along with the Bulgarians, Albanians and Vlachs, barbarians crowding down from the north.
The Grecian language still lives, the tongue of a spirited and rising modern people. But the Greeks of the classic period—the Hellenes of literature, art and philosophy—will never be known again. Says Mr. W. H. Ireland:
'Most of the old Greek race has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed, there is a strong ground for the statement that there was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George.'
The modern Greek has been called a "Byzantinized Slav." King George himself and Constantine his son are only aliens placed on the Grecian throne to suit the convenience of outer powers, being in fact descendants of tribes which to the ancient Greeks were merely barbarians.
It is maintained that the modern Greeks are in the main the descendants of the population that inhabited Greece in the earlier centuries of Byzantine rule. Owing to the operation of various causes, historical, social and economic, that population was composed of many heterogeneous elements and represented in very limited degree the race which repulsed the Persians and built the Parthenon. The internecine conflicts of the Greek communities, wars with foreign powers, and the deadly struggles of factions in the various cities had to a large extent obliterated the old race of free citizens by the beginning of Roman period. The extermination of the Plataeans by the Spartans and of the Melians by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war, the proscription of the Athenian citizens after the war, the massacre of the Coreyrean oligarchs by the democratic party, the slaughter of the Thebans by Alexander and of the Corinthians by Mummius are among the more familiar instances of the catastrophes which overtook the civic element in the Greek cities. The void can only have been filled from the ranks of the metics or resident aliens and of the descendants of the far more numerous slave population. In the classic period four fifths of the population of Attica were slaves; of the remainder, half were meties In A.D. 100 only three thousand free arm-bearing men were in Greece. (James D. Bourchier.)
The constant little struggles of the Greeks among themselves made no great showing as to numbers compared to other wars, but they wiped out the most valuable people, the best blood, the most promising heredity on earth. This cost the world more than the killing of millions of barbarians. In two centuries there were born under the shadow of the Parthenon more men of genius than the Roman Empire had in its whole existence. Yet this empire included all the civilized world, even Greece herself. (La Pouge.)
The downfall of Greece,[6] like that of Rome, has been ascribed by Schultz to the crossing of the Greeks with the barbaric races which flocked into Hellas from every side. These resident aliens, or metics, steadily increased in number as the free Greeks disappeared. Selected slaves or helots were then made free in order to furnish fighting men, and again as these fell their places were taken by immigrants.
[6] Certain recent writers who find in environment the causes of the rise and fall of nations, ascribe the failure of Greece to the introduction in Athens and Sparta of the malaria-bearing mosquito. As to the facts in question, we have little evidence. But while the prevalence of malaria may have affected the general activity of the people, it could in no way have obliterated the mental leadership which made the strength of classic Hellas, nor could it have injected its poison into the stream of Greek heredity.
It is doubtless true at this day that "no race inhabits Greece," and the main difference between Greeks and other Balkan peoples is that, inhabiting the mountains and valleys of Hellas, they speak in dialects of the ancient tongue. Environment, except through selection and segregation, can not alter race inheritance and the modern "Greeks" have not been changed by it. Schultz observes:
'We are told that the Hellenes owed their greatness largely to the country it was their fortune to dwell in. To that same country, with the same wonderful coast line and harbors, mountains and brooks, and the same sun of Homer, the modern Greeks owe their nothingness.'
In other words, it is quite true that the Greece of Pericles owed its strength to Greek blood, not to Hellenic scenery. When all the good Greek blood was spent in suicidal wars, only slaves and foreign-born were left. " 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more."[7]
[7] In contrasting a new race with the old—as the modern Greeks with the incomparable Hellenes—we must not be unjust to the men of to-day whose limitations are evident, contrasted with a race we know mainly by its finest examples. In spite of poverty, touchiness and vanity characteristic of the modern Greek, there is good stuff in him. He is frank, hopeful, enthusiastic. The mountain Greek, at least, knows the value of freedom, and has more than once put up a brave fight for it. The valleys breed subserviency, and the Greeks of Thessaly are said to be less independent than the mountain-born.
Furthermore, we do not know that even the first Hellenes of Mycenae were an unmixed race, or that any unmixed races ever rose to such prominence as to command the world's attention. We do know that when war depletes a nation slaves and foreigners come in to fill the vacuum, and that the decline of a great race in history has always been accompanied by a debasing of its blood.
Yet out of this decadence natural selection may in time bring forward better strains, and with normal conditions of security and peace nature may begin again her work of recuperation.
In the fall of Greece we have another count against war, scarcely realized until the facts of Louvain and Malines, of Rheims and Ypres, have brought it again so vividly before us. War respects nothing, while the human soul increasingly demands veneration for its own noble and beautiful achievements. As I write this, there rise before me the paintings in the "Neue Pinakothek" at Munich, representing the twenty-one Cities of Ancient Greece, from Sparta to Salamis, from Eleusis to Corinth, not as they were, "in the glory which was Greece," not as they are now, largely fishing hamlets by the blue Aegean Sea, but as ruined arches and broken columns half hid in the ashes of war, wars which blotted out Greece from world history.
ONE of the most curious of those misstatements of fact and confusions of thought the conservative seems even more prone to make than the radical has to do with a certain suppositiously historical relation between women and war. It is assumed[1] that early society is ever militant and that because of its militarism it excludes women, women not being fighters, not only from its government, but from all its privileges, even making of them its drudges and its beasts of burden. And so, argues the conservative, women are for the same reasons disfranchised, and properly disfranchised, to-day. Whether more or less militant than it was, society is still founded on force, and because women are not as strong as men, men will not give them the vote. Besides it is only right, since they can not fight, they should not vote. It has always been so, and so it should continue to be, at any rate until war becomes a thing of the past, and that will never be, you can't change human nature, etc., etc.
[1] And, let us admit, not merely by the conservative anti-feminist. As radical and discerning a feminist as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, after asserting that physical strength was once "sole ruler," cites in agreement Walter Bagehot's reference to "the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks early society." ("Women and the Alphabet," p. 49. Boston and New York, 1900.)
There are of course various answers to this militarist anti-suffrage argument, answers which in spite of the logic of current events are still likely to be satisfactory or not according to previous convictions, but the only point I wish to challenge is the appeal in this connection to the past. Let the militarist anti-suffragist assert his belief in government by force if he likes, but let him not try to justify it by the precedents of primitive life. Nor may he—or she—explain the exclusion of women to-day as a survival of their subjection in primitive society to brute force. The government of primitive society is not based on physical prowess, and although modern woman is excluded from men's activities for the same reason as primitive woman was excluded, the reason is not muscular inferiority.
It is a pity in the feminist controversies of the last hundred years or so that the "exclusion of women" did not become a more popular phrase than the "subjection of women." That term gave a fallacious twist both to observation and analysis. Primitive and modern men alike commonly EXCLUDE women, they seldom subject them. Similarly, in some societies, children and young people, all in fact but the elderly, are treated to methods of exclusion rather than of subjection.
Early society is dominated by the elders; its practices and customs have been determined by them and, in the most primitive society, government is nothing but a gerontocracy, a government of old men. Even with chieftaincy the council of the elders is weighty and the heads of households have considerable influence. Are the elders the fighters or raiders of the tribe? No, they are its judges, its legislators and, most important of all, its magicians. Nor is the chief or king the fighter par excellence of the tribe. But he too may be and often is the tribal magician. Through their powers of magic elders and chiefs are responsible for the weather, for the reproduction of plants and animals, for the success of the crops, of hunts and catches, for the health and general welfare of the people. And in war? In war they are the most important personages too. Because they fight? No, because in war too they make magic; they charm the approaches to the village, they "doctor" the trails or the weapons or the canoes, they make war medicine, they invoke and propitiate the war gods. The warriors are the younger men, men whose efforts would be vain without the backing of their magic-working seniors or chiefs. The elders make peace and declare war. And it is at their dictate that the young men take to head-hunting or to raiding or even to stealing women.
As to the subjection of women, what exists of it the elders are responsible for. It is they who scare a girl or shame her into being docile. It is they who marry her off against her will, it is they who set her unending tasks or shut her up in idleness. It is they who make her undergo the discomforts or miseries of what we call conventional life or bully her into exile or death.
With this control of girls or women the warriors, the "standing army," have little or nothing to do, even less in primitive life than in modern. It is the old people, the old women at times as well as the old men. Again it is the old men who are leaders in the exclusion of the women. In control of the initiation of the youths, they separate them from their mothers or sisters and often decree for the initiates a ceremonial avoidance of all women for a set time. The penalties they threaten—sickness, decrepitude, effeminacy—are too dire to pass unheeded. This "avoidance" has been explained as due to the monopolistic spirit of the elders. With their women they want no interference by the youths. But a far more plausible explanation, I think, takes the avoidance as a concentration rite, so to speak, a symbol, if you like, of the life ahead, the life in which the boys, "made" men, are going to have little to do in public with women. For even after the special avoidance of the initiation period ends, the segregation of the sexes continues. Men keep together and away from women in their club-houses, and in all the places of assembly which are differentiated from the primitive club-house—the church, the council, the workshop, the gymnasium, the university, the play-house. And from all the interests which center in these places men have from time to time excluded women, they have excluded them from magic and religion, from arts and letters, from games, from politics and, let me add, from war.
Why are men so exclusive? Because—the reason will seem almost too simple, I fear, for acceptance—because now and always men do not want to be bothered by women. Women get in our way, they say, women are a nuisance. Almost anywhere away from home women are a nuisance—in church organization, in the university, in business, etc. Of course if women can be kept apart from us in these activities and will stay in their place, if they join an order of nuns or deaconesses, if they go to a separate college in the university, if they will become good stenographers, we don't mind having their cooperation, we welcome it. Women may even go to war—as an absolutely separate division of the army, said the men of Dahomi, as non-combatant pahia women or workers of magic, said the Roro-speaking tribesmen of New Guinea, or as Red (dross nurses, say the men of Europe and America. If we men can be sure women will not interfere with us, we really do not mind. Women have only to give us that assurance of non-interference to make us doubt the assertion we sometimes make that in going to war they are interfering with the order of nature.
THERE are good reasons for believing that the Russians are practically the greatest peace people in Christendom. They are the least commercial in the competitive sense, the least capitalistic also, and as a people, the least combative in Europe, despite the wrecks of warring dynasties that ten centuries have left upon their plains and the miscellaneous strifes and calamities of all kinds that have beset them.
Always expanding along lines of least resistance; absorbing by comparatively petty conquests, decaying or scanty peoples; reaching Kamchatka in the Far East with more ease than she reached the shores of the Baltic; never flinging her legions far and wide victoriously as did Rome, Spain, France or Great Britain—Russia remains to-day, for the most part, humble, and, in reality, a conquered people, living, dreaming and preaching a morality born both of this humility and of the physical environment that has helped to foster it. All Muscovy can not be judged by those few who live in the saddle—the Cossack population, men and women, numbers only about two million—nor by the pitiable pageant of despotism the observer beholds in their land: pogroms, poverty, disease, distress, militarism, orthodoxy and Pan-Slavism. Russia has a soul in spite of these; a gentle and beautiful soul, only half revealed, and too much concealed by her dilapidation and her dilemma; a peaceful soul, abnormally humble and devout, and in respect to these qualities unequalled in Christendom.
Since the age of Vladimir the Holy, "The Beautiful Sun of Kief," in the tenth century, Russia has had the tradition of international peace. Vladimir wandered over the country, sword and battle ax in hand, like a reincarnation of Thor, armed with his mighty and wondrous hammer. Then came his yearning for a new religion—something to inspire his life better than Perun—Russia's old god of thunder—and the other idols, and a little later, the picturesque investigation of his peripatetic commissioners having been completed, he became a Christian of the Greek church, was baptized with many fine and grand ceremonies, compelled his docile people to do likewise, and, like a true Northman that he was—the great grandson of Rurik of the Baltic wilds—he so impressed his frowsy hordes, half Scythian and half Slav, that now in the hearts of their descendants, in their popular songs and legends, in those concerning Kief especially—a beautiful and pathetic strain of music eight centuries old—he, Vladimir, is still the central heroic figure; once a man, but now a kind of god, sent from Heaven to rule, enlighten and bring peace to his people and be known in story and song as "Vladimir the Holy, the Beautiful Sun of Kief."
An old chronicle describes for us how his hordes drank their cup of trembling at his hands. There, around about the low hills of the southern Dnieper River, probably on the crumbling sandstone cliffs of Kief—the city, studded with jewel-like legends and famed for its "golden palaces," stood his candidates for baptism; near by were priests from Constantinople, gorgeously arrayed, chanting, in strains unknown to the populace, the Greek church baptismal service. Then the democratic immersion!—rich man, poor man and all, at Vladimir's command, wade into the baptismal waters, some up to their knees, some to their waists, some to their necks, and, thus finding a new faith from Heaven, they crossed themselves for the first time as the thunder rolled on high! Here is Russia remembering her Creator in the days of her youth—and forgetting Him ever since; from then on, Holy Russia! Possibly Holy Vladimir, at any rate, for becoming, with that ceremony, peaceable, except for self-defence, he gave up all of his idols and his aggressive sword. The former he scourged and cast into the river, the latter he sheathed in its scabbard. And all this about 988—the first peace movement of Holy Russia. The faith of it, and its vision and dream came early in her history and have not yet gone out or been extinguished.
Before the next such movement, time enough passed by to give the seasons and the winds and rains full opportunity to whittle down old Kief's storied sandstone hills. In 1815, the much-expanded realm of Muscovy, then a partner in the holy alliance, proclaimed under Alexander the First, the ideal of peace. This Czar declared he would rule as a father over his children and in the interest of "justice, charity and peace," and, in so doing, created the leading precedent for the peace program of Nicolas the Second.
Alexander, who in the first half of his reign ruled liberally for the days of Napoleonic supremacy, no doubt was sincere in his desire to govern in the "spirit of brotherhood," but in the latter years of his power, he fell sadly short of this standard.
Alexander the Second, the emancipator of forty-six million serfs, may have had some world peace ideal in mind when he in 1874 promoted a conference in Brussels to codify the usages of war, but the reaction from his earlier liberalism was setting in about this time and, growing worse, led to his assassination in 1881.
The next move in the direction of peace came, as the world rather well knows, through the present Czar, Nicolas the Second, who on ascending the throne in 1894, proclaimed that Russia would rule in the interests of peace and would cultivate the arts of it. In 1898 followed the first call for a World Peace Conference, and in 1899 came another circular with a similar object.
But it is out of the kind heart of Muscovy, and from the troubled, humble and penitent soul of Russia that the real peace movement of her land has arisen. For many centuries calamities have been pouring upon her plains, profusely pouring—drought, famine and invasions without number; now Rurik and his Northmen to start the empire out of its prehistoric lethargy; their dynasty of conquering blood still sharing in the rulership of the land to-day; now the Tartars, remnants of whom with their high cheek bones are still visible in the Baltic provinces; particularly and always and ever poverty beyond description; poverty, disaster and conquest, like triple demons to humiliate the soul of Russia and keep her dumb for many centuries, except for the beauty of her unending song.
And out of these conditions of life has grown the peace morality that is native to the Russian people; out of their sorrows and their conquered plains, out of their broken hearts too, although the economic genesis of it all is very apparent.
The Russian people's Russia has ever been under the overlords heel, downtrodden years without number, and yet it is a land which has never produced a system of military tactics and training—forever dependent for these creations upon her neighbors; a land which has produced scarcely one great naval or military commander who to-day holds a place in history as do those of other nations; a land whose people have been usually led to slaughter like sheep by Northman or Teutonic or Polish generals; whose armies have never been noted for their great campaigns, and always have been poorly drilled, managed and fed, and never yet successful in any foreign wars. Surely from such a land as this, no widespread war-morality or world-conquering legions could come.
In fact the very reverse has come to pass: the philosophy of Slavophilism has arisen in Muscovy, yet not so much arisen as it has developed with the Russian soul, not as a thing apart, but as a quality thereof, blossoming somehow with all other Russian things, out of the primitive Scythian darkness. The rebellious spirit having been crushed out of the generations since, what is left but non-resistance? Yet in these latter years a resisting spirit, nursed and suckled largely in western Europe, has falsely made it appear that all Russia was in arms, storming with chaotic unity at the church, the state and the army, deluging their ancient customs with the destructive and re-creative might of radicalism. Far and wide of the truth is this! Let no one think the vast heart of Russia has changed! Only the few have cast away the ancient quiet; only the few have the modern consciousness instead of the medieval, theocratic one; only the few are not at heart Slavophiles in feeling and in morality.
This philosophy existed long in the national or social mind before it was crystallized into public doctrines, and exists even yet largely in its more primitive unworded or instinctive form, although it was Peter the Great who unconsciously awoke the latent and then unexpressed Slavophilic feelings and moralities when he, like a civilizing Pied Piper, charmed the chieftains of industry of Western Europe to follow his trail into Muscovy, his "Empire of Little Villages," and there regenerate them.
Therefore at about the end of the seventeenth century in Russia, the "dumb silent centuries" gradually became articulate in expressing their opposition to all things western. This is the heart of Slavophilism, and no one can truly fathom the Russian soul before understanding its philosophy. It is the Muscovite theory of the simple life, still crying out against the Great Peter's work and recalling the devotees of western culture to its idealization of medieval, theocratic, autocratic Russia.
Despite this reaction, however, it has a great meaning, a tender beauty, and a message of depth and power for our western world. Primarily Russia is a peasant and an agricultural land, and there is a colorless monotony in her vast plains. Indeed land and people are alike; as in the average peasant there is patience, resignation and submission, so there is in the very land itself. Open and prostrate it lies beneath the torrid sun of the south, and the arctic winds of the north; subdued and downtrodden for centuries, it and its people have always been at the mercy of ruthless men and rainless winds.
Thus passive endurance has become one of the saving qualities of the Russian's soul. The peasant's nature is one that has few wants and little rebellious power. The Greek church of the simple gospel is his and a government of the Czar's will. His power of self renunciation is one which in Slavophilic thought gives him true liberty. Therefore ask the followers of this doctrine, what need is there of the constitutional liberties of the west, or its republics or limited monarchies, or its differences in ecclesiastical faith and structure? Slavophilism declares that Russia has the only true freedom, faith and brotherhood, which other lands sadly lack. In addition she has the ancient and splendid heritage of the communal land system, wherein the inherent justice of the Russian peasant's heart is shown by his voluntary division and re-division of the land among his brothers at stated times.
What need therefore, Slavophilism asks, for the degenerate justice of the west? None! Away with Europe then!—the Europe of competition and gruesome factories! The Europe of destructive forces, of greedy land grabbers, of capital and labor wars, where society is held together, not as in Russia by the ties of affection, brotherhood and communal interest, but only by money and greed, and where free thinkers, atheists and materialists abound, whose lives and thoughts would unsettle the holy, orthodox feelings of Russia, disturb her ancient conscience and poison her humility with murmurings of discontent and rebellion.
Away with the books of the west, too! And its agricultural implements! Wooden ploughs instead of chilled steel! Outdoor work and not indoor prisons called factories! Peasants working for centuries beneath the uncanopied sun, and on the floors without walls, will not let doors and brickwork thumbscrew their souls in confinement thus! Indoors awhile in winter will they labor, but spring airs shatter the moralities of the time-clock and away to the fields they rush; in the spring to sow and sing, in the summer to sing again and at the harvest time too, and then to plait the bearded stalks into wreaths and crown the maidens with sheaths of corn; the hymns for the "death of winter" and the "birth of spring," marriage songs and funeral dirges and chants of olden times well intermingled with the labor of their hands.
Herein the poetry of agricultural, peaceable Russia clashes with the prosaic efficiency of the west, the efficiency of commercial wars, strikes and class struggles which peasant Muscovy has known so little.
And again, Slavophilism, with its theory of successive civilizations, culled perhaps from the philosophy of Hegel, each civilization superior to its forerunner, comes to show us a vision: the gradual displacement of one type of society by another, but continuing what is best in the preceding until nothing except what is good remains and universal peace results, thus portraying the displacement of national civilizations by universal ones, from which ultimately an idealistic world policy will result, and the federation and peace of men.
Some Slavophiles saw even in Peter's work a process of progressing from nationality to universality. In his time there was the same yearning toward its peaceful ideal. The "Old Russia" party wanted Peter to renounce war and conquest. Alexis, his own murdered son, worked with this element which was very largely representative of the nation. To them, St. Petersburg, then a new and growing capitol, was typical of change, unrest and falsity; Moscow was in their hearts the only capital, typical of Russia's old comfort and quiet. Many nobles antagonized Peter, but he swept them aside, imprisoning them or sending them to the gallows. Like Russia's slight resistance to Rurik and others, and to the Tartars, so was her feebleness before Peter the Great, who was himself, however, by no means an accomplished military leader, but an enlightened barbarian, dealing with a people whom writers and observers declare to be endowed with conspicuous traits of humility, scarcely found in the Christian nations of the western world.
Russian fiction represents its people in the same way. Unaggressive characters, who talk and think but do not act, fill its novels; they dream of the great age of the "Universal Idea" that shall come for all and regenerate the "rotten west," where "rationalism is the original sin"; the typical west that Slavophilism condemns—the west of the struggles between the rulers and the ruled; between Scripture and tradition and the upper and lower classes. The Slavophile idea, in theory at least, leaves no room for this. Christian love and humility and peasant communes, where rationalism, strife and rebellion are unknown, must be instituted in the west; then the "Universal Idea" of Russia will create Millennial times. This was the "Messianic hope of Slavophilism," and perhaps is yet to a great degree destined in the minds of its devotees to give the last feature to the development of the world, so that the love and feeling of the east would appease the discord of the west, diluting its discipline and its logic with true religious intuition and humility, and eventually the idealized relationship of autocracy for the Czar and self-government for the people—the old system so rudely strained by Peter the Great—would permeate the ruled and rulers of the world.
Here then is Slavophilism! And pacific Russia—the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of the ancient regime.
Among the prominent advocates of this philosophy might be mentioned, first, Constantine Aksakoff, Russia's Rousseau, who in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a virtuous propagandist of the doctrine. He earnestly, even religiously, preached the return of Russia from the allurements of western Europe, unto her own theory of national salvation, declaring that "the social order of the west is on a false foundation" and that Slavophilism would offset its degeneracy, if only Russia would free herself from the false class leadership for whose origin the Great Peter stands the convicted sponsor! Thus Slavophilism, under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are the "beyond men" and need them not. Thus before Peter's reign all was Slavophilic!—a religion of the simple Christian gospel, a church considering itself the only true ecclesia, a government of the Czar's will, a life of passive humility; creating freedom of conscience and speech for the peasants, and freedom of activity and legislation for the rulers, unknown in modern corrupted Russia!
And thus was old peaceable-hearted Muscovy of the past centuries pictured as the metropolis of true political and individual morality.
Herzen, too, an able pamphleteer in revolutionary things, preached something similar, crying from his pulpit at home or in exile, that Russia would solve all her problems and lead the human race by the simplicity of the Slavophile ideal. His early and rabid westernism was greatly tempered on contact with the west. Disillusion and disgust overcame him. The mercantilism of the bourgeoisie there drove him into Aksakoff's fold, and he too thereafter found faith alone in the "regenerative power of Russia," and her system of the mir, the central sun of the Slavophilic state, the village commune, self-governing and self-contained. And then from that, this was to ensue: the whole world made of village communes as in Russia, perhaps even their log cabins too, and fresh mud to go with them on their walls! But this did not deter the vision of these evangelists. The commune was to be indefinitely extended; national and international ones were to be organized, all self- governing, and then would follow as the night the day, universal peace wherever these communes were found.
This is the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the dream of pacific Pan-Slavism.
Dostoievsky himself is of it, and is luminous not with a mere facet flash of its philosophy but with the whole orb of it. To him the Russians "are more than human, they are pan-human."
Count Tolstoi too must be listed with these preachers. He, making his own shoes and cutting his own and the peasants' grain, lived it, showing how he thought the world's work ought to be done. What were factories or the culture of the west to him in later years—Shakespeare or no Shakespeare? Destructive ideals of life. Competition, money and land greed, self-assertion—all things that are the anthitheses of Slavophilism—he shunned; mocking the palsied heart and poisoned ideals of the west, and indeed of the "upper class" section of his own land as no other Slavophile did. And following its teaching, he journeyed through self-renunciation to freedom and communal life, after repentance for his wanderings, expiation and regeneration.
Dostoievsky, on the other hand, reached this philosophy largely by being born to it among the humble people who lived it. Melancholy-minded by nature—a sort of a Russian Dante but living in actual infernos and purgatorios, Siberia and prison cells, he came at last to worship his fellow countrymen and their ideals as almost nothing else in heaven or earth, and bowed down before them "as the only remnant left of Christian humility, destined by Providence to regenerate the world." Here is Slavophilism in a fervid extreme. "The Down-trodden and Offended," "Memoirs of a Dead House," "Crime and Punishment," "Poor People,"—these, the titles of his novels, show the predilections of his own soul. He died in the mystic frenzy of this enthusiasm.
Here then, in this philosophy and in the lives of these men, is something of the soul of Russia, beautiful in its humility, yet not so humble that it is not ambitious to embrace the world in the folding arms of its peace, its communal government and its morality. Pan-Slavism of this nature is the only kind that in truth can ever come from Russia. Pan-Slavism of the military sort, with musketry, bribery and all other diabolic black arts, miscalled government, rests on such a slim foundation that it need be but little apprehended.
It was this brotherly humble soul of Russia that greatly helped to put an end to the Russo-Japanese war: not merely failing finances and lack of transportation. The feeling of a kindly people for their own and a neighboring race caused widespread mismanagement, opposition and wholesale desertions from the army, among both the officers and the men. The Romanoff family and official Russia caused the conflict, but human Russia, humble and poor, was a great factor in its conclusion.
There is no doubt, however, that a certain number of Slavophiles are addicted to the military mania, and this form of their belief is more dangerously reactionary than its ordinary phase. Many of these belong to the bureaucratic caste. Official Russia holds aloft the eagle; human Russia the dove. Official Russia leads the anti-Jewish massacres; human Russia is very little responsible for pogroms. Ignatieff, "Father of Lies," a bureaucrat of the military Pan-Slavic breed, about 1882, began the worst persecutions against the Jews in the last generation, and possibly Pobiedonosteff, the late procurator of the Holy Synod, was the worst offender in this one. The peaceful feelings of the masses of the people, however, do not sanction these outbreaks, and Slavophilism of such a sort is not the philosophy of the Russian heart, no matter how many pogroms may be enumerated.
It is therefore to human Russia that one must look for the true feelings of the people; to their faith and deeds, to the humility of their devotions, and prostrations before their numberless shrines and ikons, to their religious ceremonies in the open fields for huge detachments of the army, to the thousands of their yearly pilgrims to Jerusalem, to their superstitions, their poverty and long-suffering, all of which attest innate passive endurance and non-resistance, and show their kind of Slavophilism, which all in all, is much more than "mere reverence for barbarism."
The war-time excitement in their cities seemed characteristic of this national soul: "Russia is the Mother of Servia" was the street cry of the marching throngs. It might be added that the word mother, "matushka," is a prevalent one in expressing their feelings. They call their greatest river the "Mother Volga." Conquering Rome said "Father Tiber" and the native warriors of this continent called the Mississippi the "Father of Waters." The difference in these appellations shows the tender quality of the Russian soul, whose ardent sympathies in July, 1914, were greatly aroused by the spectacle of a large nation attacking a small one, notwithstanding whatever may be said to justify that deed.
Finally, however, let it be added, that the one thing that will recreate Russia in the image of the west, is capital. Once let the vast sums that have invaded Muscovy be put, not to the autocratic purpose of the official rulers, but into factories, mines, city subways and transportation of all kinds, irrigation, canals, agricultural implements and to other productive uses, then capitalistic Russia will stand forth shorn of the Slavophilic simplicities of non-resistance and humility. Labor wars, practically unknown hitherto, yet now beginning, will occur in much greater number and the peasant class, still unified, will be torn asunder by differences in wealth and interests; the middle class, now very small, will grow to large proportions, and many destructive forces will come upon the land which has hitherto mocked western Europe because of their presence there.
The many centuries of peasant unity, with its beauty of brotherhood, affection and communal interests, will come to an end under such a new regime. Already competitive forces are dissolving communism in land, and many of the old beauties of Russia are disappearing. Capitalism will bring with it much turmoil and strife, unhappiness and death, but also the dawn of brighter hours; newer and better cities, cleaner water, better food, houses and clothes, and after the stress of its first attack is over, and Russia has evolved laws and means to control and socialize the invader, it may be that the old simplicities and beauties of life will return, and a greater and holier Russia will arise, still able to teach and aid in the regeneration of the rest of the world.
BY DR. J. H. McBRIDE
THE first duty of a people is to provide for the health of its children. The possible human value of any country fifty years ahead depends chiefly upon what is done by and for its children. They are the future in the making.
History seems to justify the statement of Professor Tyler[1] that conquering races have been physically strong races, and that nations have failed when they became degenerate.
[1] Growth and Education," J. M. Tyler.
Dionysius, speaking of the advantage of virility in a nation, said,
It is a law of Nature common to all mankind, which no time shall annul or destroy, that those who have more strength and excellence shall bear rule over those who have less.
This law applies equally to individuals. Skill, cunning and reason play their part, but the animal quality of endurance is always back of these and is often decisive in a contest.
Darwin said he had difficulty in applying the law of the survival of the fittest to the facts of the destruction of Greece until it occurred to him that in this instance the strongest was the fittest. Civilized people's have been destroyed by ruder races that were physically superior.
The children that are now in our schools will take to adult life such foundation as heredity has furnished, with the equipment that society may care to add. We of this day have no greater obligation than to prepare these children mentally and physically for the duties that maturity may bring. Man did not escape the physical necessities of the body when he became civilized; the advantages of health are as great to-day as when our forebears lived in tents. Very few of the primitive man's activities are left; what he did regularly and from necessity we do incidentally, and usually for sport, and yet the demands upon the energies of man have not been lessened, they have only been changed in form.
Our educational authorities, though in many instances interested in physical development of the young, have not given the subject the important place in their program that it deserves. This is not wholly due to indifference, but largely to their ideals that were derived from classical-ascetic standards.
In the medieval ideal the human body was animal and sinful, to be despised and repressed. The mind was said to be the spiritual element in man, representing the immortal part of his nature, and therefore was the only part worthy of attention in an educational system. From the fall of the Roman empire to the later nineteenth century this ideal dominated education.
The medieval universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, provided only for mental training. Their education was intended for those who were to follow the professions or to become scholars or gentlemen of leisure. Education was not intended to prepare the great mass of men for the every-day work of life.
While only indirectly related to my subject, it is interesting to recall that there was in this country in the early nineteenth century much opposition to the establishment of common schools for the masses. It was claimed that those who belonged to the working classes did not need to be educated. Our own colleges and universities were originally founded on the old classical-ascetic model, so that the spirit of the medieval period survived in the educational plan of this country. It is only in recent decades that these institutions have begun to depart from the older, formal, classical methods that made education a privilege of the few, the average man being deprived of the advantages of the training that he needed. Because of this the humble millions of men and women who wove and spun, and fed and housed the world were left out of the educational scheme.
Some years ago a London weekly paper, which speaks for the conservative class of England, in discussing certain suggested innovations in English higher education, said that the great merit of education at Oxford and Cambridge was that it was "absolutely useless." By this it was probably meant that the education was for a chosen few, was not intended to prepare men for the practical work of life and was essentially and only an intellectual and cultural training.
The change of attitude that is seen in our day is due chiefly to two great discoveries: the re-discovery of the human body and its relation to our mentality and the discovery of the mind of the child and youth. We have found that man is an animal who graduated from caves and dugouts and to whom even barbarism was a lade and great achievement. That the human body was made by the experiences of that rude life, and that since then we have made no change in it except to stand on two feet. Neither have we added one nerve cell or fiber to our brains since the day when the cave was home and uncooked food the daily diet.
The conception of man as an animal has led to a study of him as such. Educators as a class now concede that the physical man must be considered as an essential part of their scheme, that the brain is an organ of the body among other organs, and is subject to the same laws and influenced by similar conditions.
The influence of the mind upon the body is a commonplace of psychology, but the influence of the body upon the mind is of equal importance, though less frequently emphasized.
Whatever one's theory of the nature of mind, it must be considered in relation to the brain as the organ of its expression. The mind has, too, a broader base than the brain, for every organ of the body has some share in the mental functions. Every physician knows that physical disease lowers the quality of the thinking and, with the exception of a few geniuses like Darwin and Leopardi, it makes impossible intellectual work of a high order. Disorders of the internal organs rob the brain of nourishment and weaken it, and by obtruding their morbidness upon it they batter down its resistances and lower the thinking power.
Though we can never know the history of man's origin, the lives of the child and of the wild man help us to understand something of the order of racial development. All the higher mental faculties grow in the child as they grew in the race—out of impulse, instinct, feeling; and from infancy to maturity we recapitulate mentally and physically the early human-making stages, short circuiting in twenty years the race-process.
The life of physical activity that the child leads develops and coordinates the brain and the muscular system. In this way the great motor functions are organized in the brain and become part of the physical basis of mind.
The older education that trained the intellect exclusively, without reference to the practical demands of life or the needs of the body, was inadequate in that it ignored the law of thinking and doing. It is true that there is much to its credit, as many fine spirits have testified. They at least survived it.
Stanley Hall says "we think in terms of muscular movement," and this expresses the most important single fact in the mature mentality. That the mind is largely constituted of memories of muscular movements is basic in development.
The muscles are the special organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their functional activities are organized into the mental life. This is why "we think in terms of muscular movement," and why muscular training supplies a natural need of the developing mind.
The normal boy says little or nothing of what he thinks, but much of what he is doing or intends to do. He has the motor mind, the instinct for doing things by which he builds the brain and body. It is nature's way of laying the foundation in the individual as by the more tedious process of evolution she laid it in the race. The mental development of the normal infant is indicated by the increasing accuracy and delicacy of muscular coordination. The feeble-minded child very early shows its mental defect in the clumsy use of its muscles. Because of the functional relation of the voluntary muscles and the mentality, physical training is in a large degree mental training. When by such training we give dexterity to muscles of the growing person we are making possible better mental development; that is, because of this relation of the mind to action there is a direct mental discipline in the thought-out processes of physical activity. If, then, we make physical development a part of our educational process, we are taking advantage of race tendencies, we are starting the individual as nature started the race; we are laying the foundation in the individual as it was originally laid in the race; we are building as the race built.
Exclusively intellectual training may be sufficient for the genius or for the few who have great initiative and intellectual self-confidence, but for the great mass of boys and girls this training is not sufficient. It does not prepare the young for the kind of work that three fourths of them will have to do. We are now beginning to recognize this and through manual training, vocational guidance, etc., we are teaching boys and girls how to do things, and this, too, has the additional merit of being, in a measure, physical training.
Educators, until recently, have, in emphasizing the paramount importance of mental training, lost sight of the needs of the body. Their classical ideals and formal methods made dead languages, mathematics, philosophy etc., the school diet of boys whose normal hunger was for action, and for learning by doing.
Sir William Hamilton, who wrote fairy tales in metaphysics for a generation of Scotchmen, placed these lines over the doorway of his lecture room.
In earth there 's nothing great but Man;In Man there 's nothing great but Mind.
This sounds well, but it is poor philosophy. There is much in earth that is great besides man and much in man that is great besides his mind. The older type of metaphysician with his staggering vocabulary and his bag of "categories" has now chiefly a historic interest. In the modern view the interdependence of mind and body is a fundamental fact of life. As science reveals the physiologic marvels of the once despised body, the latter grows in our respect, for we find that its seeming humble functions are intimately related to our highest powers. Sir William's couplet gives a hint of the dominance of the classical method of his day. It overemphasized the importance of reason and too often converted the youthful mind into a rag bag of useless information. The educators of that time and since have thought more highly of human reason than experience justifies. With their medieval bias for a world of will and reason, they drove the young with the whip and spur of emulation toward what to them seemed the one possible goal, intellectual achievement.
We exaggerate the share that reason has in conduct. In the history of the race, which is epitomized in the life of every individual, reason was a late outgrowth of feeling, passion, impulse, instinct. It was these older faculties that ruled the life of the primitive man who made the race, and it was through them that the race gradually rose to reason by what Emerson would call the "spiral stairway of development."
These functions of impulse and instinct dominate the life of the child and they are only a little less potent in the conduct of us grownups. Much of what we call reason is feeling, and much of our life activities are due to desire, sentiment, instinct and habit, which, under the illusion of reason, determine our decisions and conduct. Some one has said that reason is the light that nature has placed at the tip of instinct, and it is certainly true that without these earlier, basal faculties reason would be a feeble light. During the growing period these are specially strong, and the important thing is that they be guided and organized in relation to the needs of maturity. In combining mental and physical training we are in some measure furnishing this guidance, doing intentionally what nature did originally without design.
In the uncivilized state the stress of life was chiefly physical. The civilized man has to a large degree reversed this old order, in that the use of the body is incidental in his work, the stress being placed upon the brain. He piles his life high with complexities and in place of life being for necessities, and they few and simple, it is largely for comforts which we call necessities, and Professor Huxley has said that the struggle for comforts is more cruel than the struggle for existence.
This stress which is put upon conscious effort in civilization places a new and severe tax upon the brain. It intensifies and narrows the range of man's activities; it causes him to specialize and localize the strain to a degree that may be dangerous. It is certainly true that every man has his breaking strain, and there is nothing that will raise the limit of endurance like a strong and well-developed body.
The Italian physiologist, Mosso, showed by an ingenious device that when a person lying quite still was required to add a column of figures, blood left the extremities and flowed toward the brain. Any emotional state or effort of thought produces the same result. This demonstration that we think to our fingers' ends suggests the importance of a strong body as a prompt support in mental work.
All our work, mental as well as physical, is a test of endurance, not a test that is spiritual and non-material, but even in the sphere of the mind it is plainly animal and physical. Thinking is primarily a physical process and draws upon the vital stores of every organ. The energy that makes clear thinking possible depends largely upon the vigor of the body, and to the extent that this fails, the brain functions suffer. Therefore, any work, mental or physical, will be better done and more easily done if the body is strong. Other things being equal, the intellectual work of the strong man will be better done than similar work by one of equal talent, but who is not strong.
Big muscles are not necessary in physical development. Many people are not designed for big muscles, and any attempt by them to produce a heavy, massive development may do harm. What is wanted is vigor, skill, muscular readiness and a reawakening of the old associations of thought and action. Such training goes further than thought and action, for it reaches all the organs and adds immensely to the vital capacity and working power of the individual.
The play instinct of the child is as old as the race, or older, and is a vitally important factor, not only in physical development, but also in mental development. In its destructive and disorderly activities the child shows the later adult forces in the formative stage. Old instincts and movements that were once self-preservative and of serious meaning to a wild ancestor reappear in the play of children, and, utilized wisely, may under new form become a valuable possession of the adult. There is a great big man, in fact, several possible men, inside every boy. Through his running, jumping, fighting, swimming, through impulse, instincts and emotions he is seeking the man that is in him, and it is by this turbulent and experimental course that he finally comes to the order of maturity.
Every boy is a vitally coiled up set of springs pressing to be released. Race-old energies are struggling in him for expression, and play is the normal way to satisfy the great demand. The child may miss some important things and yet get on, but it can not, without severe and lasting harm miss the instinctive activities of play.
In play and games the young are re-enacting these old muscular coordinations and developing mind and body on the old foundation. The boy's love of outdoor sports and the adventures of hunting are significant. Those ancestors of ours who hunted and fished and shaped with care their arrow heads were developing a manual skill and thinking power that we inherit. We use our muscles for more varied and possibly more finished purposes, but it is through the patience and practise of their rude lives that we possess the delicate uses of the hands and the finer dexterities of the mind.
The boy who goes whistling to the fields, or hunts, or fishes, or swims, is unconsciously reaching out toward later life and is preparing for serious and bigger things.
The growing formative period of life is the time for good physical development. Whatever is gained and fixed then is permanent, as it becomes a part of the physiological habits of the individual. The years before twenty decide the future energy stores, and the capacity to endure. Every function enlarged, every gain of power, is additional storage room for energy, to be drawn upon in the coming days of adult stress.
Good physical development not only gives strength and skill in the use of the body, but develops a physiological habit of surplus power that may be called quantity of energy. Life is not alone in quality, in delicacy of adjustment, in accuracy, in fineness of feeling; it is also in quantity. The poet who, with frail physique and feeble pulse, sits in his quiet retreat and puts his fine fancies into the rhythms of verse has quality. But in the stress and rivalry of life that awaits the majority of men, there is a need for quantity of energy, such as enabled a Washington or a Caesar or a Napoleon or a Wellington to shoulder his way through difficulties. These men combined quality with quantity and this combination may make, and often does make, the life of masterful achievement. The quantity of energy in us average men may make the difference between success and failure.
Many men fail in life for lack of staying power, for lack of that kind of endurance that is furnished by having power in reserve.
The strong, confident person who has strength to spare, reserves of energy, does his work easily and without friction. Half the timidities and indecisions of men are chargeable less to lack of ability than to lack of the physical vigor, the QUANTITY of energy, which is the driving power of character. In all the contests of life an important element in success is the ability to endure prolonged stress, to have the reserve energy that can be drawn upon and utilized as a driving force. This power is not alone necessary in the emergencies, the "short hauls" of life, but also in the long hauls that spread the strain through greater periods. Many of the failures of life are due as much to lack of ability to meet prolonged stress as to lack of experience or intelligence. Men of moderate ability but with great powers of endurance often succeed, while men of greater talent fail for lack of the ability to endure strain.
The man with a weak body and without the self-confidence that surplus energy gives is liable to be of uncertain judgment. Such a man in the presence of a problem requiring quick decision, doubts and hesitates and stands shivering on the brink of action while hastening opportunities pass him by.
Much of the loose thinking of our time is undoubtedly due to poor educational drill. In fact the failure of the schools to teach pupils how to apply the mind and how to think is one of their common reproaches. Inability to use the mind effectively is also frequently due to a lack of vigor and physical stamina. A person with poor digestion, or under-developed body, or weak circulation has of necessity a badly nourished brain. Such a brain, unless it belongs to a genius, will do poor thinking.
The mentally trained person who is also physically strong has the combination that puts his powers at easy command. He can be joyously busy doing the impossible because the doing of it has been made easy by training.
How much native power there is in all of us that for want of proper training or sympathetic encouragement never comes to maturity! How many of the finer qualities of character that, for want of a kindlier climate of cheerful companionship and wise direction, failed to mature and now lie dead in us! Very many people are only partly alive. A large part, and in some, the best part, is dead. The capacity they show is probably only a small share of a fine inheritance which, not knowing how to use, they allowed to die.
We have an instinctive liking for people who are strong and healthy. They appeal to us by their robustness and their confident display of energy. We do not now need the big muscles that were once necessary in wielding spear and battle-axe. We need, however, as much as the race ever needed well-developed bodies and habits of health.
It is not difficult for us to see that sports and games and play help to physical development, but it is not so plain that they may be made to develop the best qualities of character.
It is a fact, however, that all the important elements of character are tried out in games and sports. Enthusiasm, self-confidence, the adventurous spirit, alertness, promptness, unselfishness, cooperation, quick judgment—all these have their training and discipline on the game field. They comprise those fundamental native qualities that have gone to make humanity what it is. The young should have this training, and, if of the right kind, it may be made to contribute to the making of the best kind of character. The same quickness and accuracy of judgment that enable a boy to win a point in football may in later life be used to win a battle or save a business venture. Beyond this, there is of course gained the strong body that makes work easy and stress less difficult to bear.
Hall calls attention to the fact that two generations ago, Jahn, the great builder of German physique, roused the then despairing German nation by preaching the gospel of strong bodies. He created a new spirit in Germany, and the whole nation was aroused and seized with an enthusiasm for outdoor games and sports, and there arose a new cult for the body. His pupils sang of a united fatherland and of a stronger race. The Germans are in the habit of reminding us that it was about one generation after Jahn that the German Empire was founded and Germany became a world power.
Every argument for the physical training of boys applies with equal force to girls. Women need to be physically as strong as men. No race will remain virile and progressive unless both the fathers and mothers have the physical stamina that produces healthy, vigorous offspring. In this age, when women are going out into the world to compete with men it is highly important that they be physically strong if they are to stand the stress successfully. It was from rough barbarians, the rude war-loving Teutonic men and women described by Tacitus, that the Anglo-Saxon race inherited those splendid qualities of mind and body that have made their descendants masters of seas and continents.