William James's essay on ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ written in 1910, at the end of his life, has received an increasing amount of attention during the last thirty years. This paper would raise two questions about its relation to the main body of James's work. We recall that in the essay James argues for the worthwhileness of the martial virtues in themselves and claims that, since it would in any case be difficult to get rid of them, some way of expressing them in peaceful channels should be found. A few phrases have a peculiarly modern ring. “It would be preposterous,” he says, “if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese.” Instead of military life, a conscription of youth for the battle against nature is therefore recommended. “A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”