Even so, Holmes's version of the martial ethic was far more persuasive, even moving at times—more retrospective and less bellicose, less concerned to justify America's imperial future—than the version advanced by Theodore Roosevelt and his coterie of imperialist intellectuals. Roosevelt's famous lecture, "The Strenuous Life"—like Holmes's, a set speech for every occasion—contained nothing of Holmes's moral passion. It was pure bombast. "I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife." Like Holmes, Roosevelt balanced his tribute to "virile qualities" with praise of motherhood, but without the mitigating suggestion that motherhood provided an important source of ideals for women. He was more interested in the declining birthrate, which threatened the better sort of people, he thought, with diminished influence in a nation swamped by immigrant hordes. He viewed the duties of women purely in the light of the nation's military requirements, and he lost no time in tying both motherhood and the "strenuous life" to the international competition for colonial possessions, from which the United States, he believed, unwisely might elect to abstain. "The wife must be the housewife, ... the wise and fearless mother of many healthy children." The flight from motherhood, like the American male's flight from the "great fighting, masterful virtues," would indicate, unless these trends could be reversed, that Anglo-Saxon civilization was "rotten to the core." If Americans continued to "sit huddled within our own borders," shrinking from the course of imperial duty, then the "bolder and stronger peoples" would "pass us by, and win for themselves the domination of the world."

Roosevelt did not hesitate to denounce "commercialism" as another influence that undermined the "hardy virtues," and the great capitalists naturally viewed him with distrust until they discovered that his words spoke more loudly than his actions. He urged his countrymen to renounce "that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all and end-all of national life." Other imperialists took up the cry. Industrialism should be regarded not as the "goal of national greatness" but only as a means to that end, according to Homer Lea: when it became an "end in itself," it degenerated into "commercialism" and became a "source of danger instead of power." National "opulence" led to "national effeminacy and effeteness": "corruption exists in direct ratio to the wealth of a nation." Lea blamed "excessive national wealth"

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