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administered for the public benefit, not for private profit.

Sixthly, as I have pointed out in a previous portion of this chapter, one disgraceful result of the unfettered action of the law of Supply and Demand is that widespread debasement, sophistication, falsification, and counterfeiting of commodities called adulteration. One would have thought it impossible that any voice could be raised in defence of practices so manifestedly fraudulent, and so pregnant with disastrous results of all kinds: moral, physical, and economical. But we have been told -and told by Mr. Bright!—that, after all, adulteration is only "a form of competition." That a man, himself so genuinely honest, could have offered such an apology, is a proof how fatal to the moral sense is that branch of the Utilitarian philosophy which relates to commerce and trade. Adulteration a form of competition! Yes; if competition and cheating are synonymous. For a form of cheating it is, and one of the worst forms. The petty rogue, who makes dishonest gains by his false balance and deceitful weights, is far less peccant and less noxious than the great rogue who, prostituting scientific knowledge and commercial credit to the production of spurious wares, swindles on a colossal scale. I carnestly contend that these malefactors should be punished not merely by fine, but by imprisonment with hard labour: and that when the adulterating substances employed are such as are

VII.]

THE BRITISH ARMY.

239

notoriously prejudicial to health, the adulterator should be dealt with as severely as the garotter, and should be subjected to the pain and ignominy of flogging.

Seventhly, I venture to say that the day is over when we can abandon the British Army to the law of Supply and Demand. What an army it is! An army of mercenaries, hired by the operation of that law for a miserable pittance of a few pence a day: that is all it comes to when the various stoppages have been filched from their pay. And what mercenaries! For the most part rakings She on from the gutters of our great cities, miserable alike You! in physique and in morale: "a number of shadows to fill up the muster book." Or rather, not to fill it up, for, as we all know, infantry regiments turn out four or five hundred strong, when they ought to turn out a thousand; and cavalry regiments scrape together two or three hundred sabres out of six hundred. Such are the representatives of the warriors who fought at Crécy and Agincourt, at Blenheim and Waterloo, in the Punjab and the Crimea. And the equipment provided for them by the law of Supply and Demand is worthy of them : Sh wint shoddy clothes, rotten leather, bayonets that bend,. swords that break, to say nothing of guns that burst. I put it to any candid man: Is there any more disgraceful spectacle under the sun than the British Army, as it actually exists: so miserably inefficient and so miraculously costly! Perhaps

there is just one still more disgraceful spectacle:
and that is exhibited, once a year, in the House of
Commons, when a prim official gentleman-in
private life, no doubt, most sensitive to the obliga-
tions of veracity-rises to enit the stale old lies
with which his subordinates have crammed him,
and to prove that all is for the best in the best of
possible War Offices. Surely it is time that we
should make an end of all this, if it is not to make
an end of England. Surely it is time that the
obligation of every adult man to serve his country
in arms should be recognized and enforced.
"But
this would be incompatible with the commercial
spirit of the country." That is precisely one of its
greatest recommendations. Few heavier curses
can fall upon any country than the unchecked
dominance of the commercial spirit. Legibly
enough is it written in the world's annals:

"what has tamed

Great nations; how ennobling thoughts depart
When men change swords for ledgers."

pre

(Nothing would do so much to revive the drooping spirit of British nationality as universal military service. And, assuredly, if England is to hold her place among the armed nations of the world, come it must, sooner or later. Whether anything short of a great disaster to the country will bring it, may well be doubted.* But what cannot be doubted is

* The case of the Volunteers offers too good warrant for such dubiety. Here is admirable material which, in the judgment of

VII.]

THE TASK OF PHILOSOPHY.

241

that war, however horrible in itself, is an instrument of the greatest good: nay, that it is, in Hegel's phrase, "a high necessity in the world's order," human nature being what it is: purifying, tranquillising, uniting a people as nothing else it for unites enforcing self-sacrifice: weaning from the lust of lucre, the cult of comfort.

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Sinal Philosophy &

The seven Shibboleths which we have considered in the foregoing pages appear to me fairly to represent the body of opinion specially characteristic of the time. No doubt, in the vast majority of minds, they exist as mere nebulous notions. Like the algebraic they denote an unknown quantity. They are symbols in problems. And the problems are never worked out. To work them out is the task of philosophy, not in the restricted sense of metaphysics, but in the larger signification properly attaching to it, of real knowledge as opposed to mere opinion.* If this book, in any degree, fulfils the most competent authorities, might, with proper military guidance and equipment, be made an effective instrument of national defence. But no Ministry, no Minister, has ventured to jeopardise place at the call of patriotism, by proposing, or even by candidly confessing, the expenditure necessary to convert the Auxiliary Forces from a delusion and a means of national weakness, into a reality and an element of national strength.

* Τὸν φιλόσοφον σοφίας φήσομεν ἐπιθυμητὴν εἶναι, οὐ τῆς μέν, τῆς δ ̓ οὔ, ἀλλὰ πασῆς.—Plato, Rep., 475 Β.

R

its design as a contribution to that task, it will not have been written in vain. The special disease of the body politic in this age is a spurious, mechanical individualism which ignores or denies that moral and spiritual force wherein consists the organic unity of men and of nations of men: "das geistige Band" we may call it, in Goethe's words. Right, according to the materialistic Revolutionary doctrine, which has so largely mixed itself with life, means merely thinking of oneself, living for oneself. The doctrine is no less absurd than ignoble. It is anarchy, in the proper sense of the word. Right, as the Latin term* witnesses, is the bond which knits mankind into society. "Commonwealths," Burke excellently observes, "are not physical but moral essences." There are for nations, as for the individuals composing them, necessary conditions of existence, irreversible laws of life. And those laws, those conditions are ethical. They belong to an order not made by man but issuing from the nature of things. The art of politics, properly understood, consists in apprehending and conforming to "the moral laws of nature and of nations."

This spurious and mechanical individualism we must strenuously combat. And it is best combated by opposing to it the true idea of the individual as an ethical agent in an ethical organism. Nothing is falser than the notion that the history of peoples Jus (jungere).

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