The Navy as a Fighting Machine | Page 6

world, and because other nations imposed their will upon her,
without meeting any resistance that required the use of war to
overcome. And even China has not lived a wholly peaceful life, despite
the non-military character of her people. Her whole history was one of
wars, like that of other nations, until the middle of the fourteenth
century of our era. Since then, she has had four wars, in all of which
she has been whipped: one in the seventeenth century when the country
was successfully invaded, and the native dynasty was overthrown by
the Tartars of Manchuria; one in 1840, when Great Britain compelled
her to cede Hong-Kong and to open five ports to foreign commerce,
through which ports opium could be introduced; one in 1860, with
Great Britain and France, that resulted in the capture of Pekin; and one
with Japan in 1894. Since that time (as well as before) China has been
the scene of revolutions and wide-spread disturbances, so that, even
though a peace-loving and non-resisting nation, peace has not reigned

within her borders. The last dynasty was overthrown in 1912. Since
then a feeble republic has dragged on a precarious existence,
interrupted by the very short reign of Yuan Shih K'ai.
This brief consideration of the trend of people up to the present time
seems to show that, owing to the nature of man himself, especially to
the nature of large "crowds" of men, the direction in which nations
have been moving hitherto has not been toward increasing the
prevalence of peace, but rather toward increasing the methods,
instruments, and areas of war; furthermore, that this direction of
movement has been necessary, in order to achieve and to maintain
prosperity in any nation.
This being the case, what forces exist that may reasonably be expected
to change that trend?
Three main forces are usually mentioned: Civilization, Commerce,
Christianity.
Before considering these it may be well to note Newton's first law of
motion, that every body will continue in a state of rest or of uniform
motion in a straight line unless acted on by some external force; for
though this law was affirmed of material bodies, yet its applicability to
large groups of men is striking and suggestive. Not only do human
beings have the physical attributes of weight and inertia like other
material bodies, but their mental organism, while of a higher order than
the physical, is as powerfully affected by external forces. And though it
is true that psychology has not yet secured her Newton, and that no one
has yet formulated a law that expresses exactly the action of the minds
and spirits of men under the influence of certain mental and moral
stimuli or forces, yet we know that our minds and spirits are influenced
by fear, hope, ambition, hate, and so forth, in ways that are fairly well
understood and toward results that often can be predicted in advance.
Our whole theory of government and our laws of business and
every-day life are founded on the belief that men are the same to-day as
they were yesterday, and that they will be the same to-morrow. The
whole science of psychology is based on the observed and recorded

actions of the human organism under the influence of certain external
stimuli or forces, and starts from the assumption that this organism has
definite and permanent characteristics. If this is not so--if the behavior
of men in the past has not been governed by actual laws which will also
govern their behavior in the future--then our laws of government are
built on error, and the teachings of psychology are foolish.
This does not mean that any man will necessarily act in the same way
to-morrow as he did yesterday, when subjected to the influence of the
same threat, inducement, or temptation; because, without grappling the
thorny question of free will, we realize that a man's action is never the
result of only one stimulus and motive, but is the resultant of many; and
we have no reason to expect that he will act in the same way when
subjected to the same stimulus, unless we know that the internal and
external conditions pertaining to him are also the same. Furthermore,
even if we cannot predict what a certain individual will do, when
exposed to a certain external influence, because of some differences in
his mental and physical condition, on one occasion in comparison with
another, yet when we consider large groups of men, we know that
individual peculiarities, permanent and temporary, balance each other
in great measure; that the average condition of a group of men is less
changeable than that of one man, and that the degree of permanency of
condition increases with the number of men in the group. From this we
may