Now, there are
occasions, no doubt, in which, a country being in desperate straits, the
soldier's valour is heightened by devotion to the cause he fights for;
but that ideal devotion like this affords no sufficient explanation of
the peculiar character of military activity generally; and that there
must be some deeper and more general cause at the back of it, is shown
by the fact that some of the most reckless soldiers known to us have
been mercenaries who would fight as willingly for one country as for
another. And this deeper and more general cause, when we look for it, is
sufficiently obvious. It consists of the fact that, owing to the
millions of years of struggle to which was due, in the first place, the
evolution of man as a species, and, in the second place, the races of
men in their existing stages of civilisation, the fighting instinct is,
in the strongest of these races, inherent after a fashion in which the
industrial instincts are not; and will always prompt numbers to do, for
the smallest wage or none, what they could hardly, in its absence, be
induced to do for the highest. This instinct, no doubt, is more
controlled than formerly, and is not so often roused; but it is still
there.
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