Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/17

 went up, not from continental Europe alone, at the measures—seriously embarrassing to our military operations, and enormously helpful to our enemy—which the British generals took in order to diminish the sufferings of the non-combatant population of the Transvaal; camps of refuge, it appears, did not sufficiently excel in comfort the hospitals of our own wounded! And there is a section of the Press in this country which still occasionally remembers, to complain of it, the fact that our generals found it necessary, for military reasons, to burn farmhouses. I should not like to attempt the conjecture, what Wellington would have said in answer to such a complaint, or what he would have done to a self-appointed emissary who visited his camps for the purpose of criticising his action! It would have been no more impossible for him to foresee the day of such things, however, than it is for us to predict the moral sense of the year 2000. The fact is that we have greatly deteriorated in war, although, or rather because, we have even more greatly improved in morals and feeling. William Morris conceived of man in the coming time as a sort of recreated mediæval. Mr Wells conceives him as practically a nineteenth-century man, with his ideas merely adjusted to new material conditions. Bellamy described him in terms of a being inconceivable by any sort of reason. No one appears to have seen that his