Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/132



As the nineteenth century drew towards its close, disturbing us with the still unsettled Eastern Question, succeeding to the terrible Russo-Turkish conflict of that time,—and as we could then look back, over even the brief term of hardly more than quarter of a century, upon quite a dozen wars of the chief civilized powers of the day, ourselves by no means outside of the fray,—it did seem as though war was fated, not to diminish, but somehow, most grievously, to increase, along with all the other and better advance of mankind. It seemed, in short, as though, in this chequered world of ours, the blessing of the one kind of advance was ever to be balanced by the curse of the other. And yet, at that very time of such despair of the world's future in that particular direction, we were, quite unawares, wonderfully close upon causes and events which were to result in the complete cessation of war, as between, at least, the great civilized powers of the world, and, in fact, in making war, in their case, a practical impossibility. Let us now see how all this came about.

Our national trust for national defence had long and proverbially been in "England's wooden walls." This figure of speech was still kept up even after our war-ships had become iron and steel instead of wood. Our military force, in those supposed safe circumstances of our insular position, had been comparatively unimportant. Defended by the said wooden walls, and behind these by our inexhaustible resources of capital, we deemed ourselves a match for all that