of war made up its "fascination." Nor was it enough to recommend high wages and shorter hours as the "only forces [capable of overcoming] man's distaste for repulsive kinds of labor." Hard work and even danger ceased to be "repulsive" when they served the "innate pugnacity and all the love of glory" that modern man inherited from his ancestors. Peace‐ loving people overlooked the importance and legitimacy of those needs, treating them as atavistic impulses destined to wither in the wake of modern rationalism and moral enlightenment. On the contrary, James argued, the need to participate in shared communities of risk and high purpose was inextinguishable. "Martial virtues," accordingly, were "absolute and permanent human goods." If they could not be realized in some other way, they would continue to be realized in war itself. James urged pacifists "to enter more deeply into the esthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents." They needed to understand why their humanitarian utopia "tastes mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's more bitter flavors." Instead of dismissing out of hand the residual opposition to moral uplift and social improvement, they would do better to see it as the expression of an "unwillingness to see the supreme theatre of human strenuousness closed." Simon Patten foresaw a shift from a "pain economy" to a "pleasure economy," but even Patten, James noted, acknowledged the morally "disintegrative influences" of superabundance. "Where is the sharpness and precipitousness," James wanted to know, "the contempt for life, whether one's own, or another? Where is the savage 'yes' and 'no,' the unconditional duty?" Men and women achieved dignity only when asked to submit to an arduous discipline imposed by some "collectivity"; and "no collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride." The undemanding life of "pacific cosmopolitan industrialism," on the other hand, could only nourish a sense of "shame" in "worthy breasts."

The only alternative to war, as James saw it, was a "moral equivalent of war," which would make the same demands on people in the name of peace, satisfy the same taste for self-sacrifice, and elicit the same qualities of devotion, loyalty, and ardor. His own solution—an army conscripted into the peacetime war "against Nature"—anticipated the Civilian Conservation Corps briefly instituted under the New Deal. It drew on the images of the American West that influenced other spokesmen for martial virtues, like Francis Parkman and Theodore Roosevelt. Life in the

-301-