In the army he learns to fly; to drop bombs; to use machine-guns
to the utmost of his capacity. The discovery of high explosives is
rewarded and dignified: instruction in the manufacture of the weapons,
battleships, submarines, and land batteries by which they are applied
destructively, is quite genuine: the instructors know their business,
and really mean the learners to succeed. The result is that powers
of destruction that could hardly without uneasiness be entrusted to
infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence are placed in the hands of
romantic schoolboy patriots who, however generous by nature, are by
education ignoramuses, dupes, snobs, and sportsmen to whom fighting is a
religion and killing an accomplishment; whilst political power, useless
under such circumstances except to militarist imperialists in chronic
terror of invasion and subjugation, pompous tufthunting fools,
commercial adventurers to whom the organization by the nation of its own
industrial services would mean checkmate, financial parasites on the
money market, and stupid people who cling to the status quo merely
because they are used to it, is obtained by heredity, by simple
purchase, by keeping newspapers and pretending that they are organs of
public opinion, by the wiles of seductive women, and by prostituting
ambitious talent to the service of the profiteers, who call the tune
because, having secured all the spare plunder, they alone can afford
to pay the piper.
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