became increasingly difficult to distinguish what was valuable in the concept of heroism from what was sinister and pernicious or to reconcile heroism with democracy, racial tolerance, and goodwill among nations.

In 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future justice, delivered a Memorial Day address, "A Soldier's Faith," in which he set forth a particularly stark and uncompromising version of the new military ethic. Deploring modern hedonism, Holmes insisted that man's "destiny is battle." Commercialism and "philanthropy," the latter with its vision of a world "without much trouble or any danger," had sapped the nation's fighting spirit. Patriotism had given way to "cosmopolitanism," a "rootless self‐ seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost." A misguided notion of justice had led humanitarians to the absurd conclusion that it was "unjust ... that any one should fail." But the stern test of war had always furnished the highest ideals of manhood, just as "those for women [had] been drawn from motherhood," and the world needed war more than ever as an antidote to "individualist negations" and "wallowing ease." The soldier's faith—"honor rather than life"—was "true and adorable," according to Holmes, precisely because it led the soldier to "throw away his life" in "obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use."

Much of this no doubt needed to be said, especially on an occasion honoring the Civil War dead, in a building—Harvard's Memorial Hall— newly dedicated to their memory. Holmes's condemnation of the "revolt against pain" and failure, his attack on the "belief that money is the main thing," even his indictment of "rootless cosmopolitanism" (language not yet appropriated and compromised by fascism) exposed important symptoms of moral and cultural decay. But Holmes discredited the heroic ideal by identifying it so closely with unthinking obedience and by glorifying war as an end in itself. "Mere excitement," William James said in reply to Holmes, "is an unworthy ideal." Holmes was not content, moreover, merely to commemorate those who had fallen in the Civil War. "A Soldier's Faith," as James noted, became his "one set speech" for "every occasion." "It's all right for once, in the exuberance of youth, to celebrate mere vital excitement, la joie de vivre as a protest against humdrum solemnity. But to make it systematic, and oppose it, as an ideal and a duty, to the ordinary religious duties, is to pervert it altogether."

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