Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/838

818 treasure, blood, and life. He says millions of men all over Europe are at this moment idling away their time in demoralizing barrack-life, trained among much physical and mental deprivation to no art but that of destroying each other skillfully, which is much as if they had been usefully employed and the products of their labor then cast into the sea. We are reminded of the immense amount of work bestowed upon a first-class ironclad, which is liable to be sent to the bottom in an instant. She may have cost $2,000,000 and her equipment another half million; so that if the ordinary laboring man earns $250 a year, on the average of twenty years of working life we have the whole life's labor of 500 men destroyed by the single loss of such a ship. Blood and health are precious; war spills the former and impairs and destroys the latter on an appalling scale. As to the waste of life, it is of course incalculable; yet, if there be a money estimate of it, the result is shocking. Laboring men are capital in society, and it is a very moderate estimate to assume them from this point of view as worth $2,500 a piece. A battle, therefore, in which 20,000 men are killed, annihilates $50,000,000 of capital in human beings alone.

The sufferings of war are conceded to be indescribable. Mr. Ram remarks: "Of all incidents of battle the one which impresses itself most strongly on my imagination is that of Borodino, where 60,000 French and Russians were left upon the ground; the groans of the wounded in the ensuing night sounded at a distance like the roar of the sea. The far-off listener might expect to hear outcries of pain and distress from such a scene, that screams of agony should arise from instant to instant, and that the doleful, piercing note should be taken up from this point and from that, and that night should be made hideous by this inarticulate misery. But here was no such intermittent lamentation. From amid 20,000 corpses arose a hoarse, uniform, unceasing roll of the anguish of 40,000 men!"

How, then, are we to regard these practices? Our author says that we must turn to Nature to find how she regards such things. Is war an exception to her course, or does she regard men fighting as a naturalist looks on tribes of ants destroying each other? The answer is, that Nature is absolutely pitiless. Her eyes never fill with tears. She multiplies to destroy, and destroys without mercy.

"Her taller trees debar the meaner shrubs from sun and breeze. It is nothing to her that the more lowly plants in the forest wither and pine for light and air. It is her will that the weakest should go to the wall. Ravin is the condition of the existence of half her creatures; and at this moment, as all around tins sea-girt ball the strong animals prey upon the weak for their daily sustenance, more skins are being pierced and torn, more bones being crushed, more blood being shed, in the far-off places of the earth than twenty Russo-Turkish wars going on together would involve. Are we to be told that Nature enjoins these things, and yet is outraged by men tearing and rending each other? Still she is not simply indifferent. She appears to have a purpose in all this. She knows that the world is not rich enough for all. She keeps it upon principle in a condition of over-population. She thinks it better that the strong should crowd out the weak than that the weak should crowd out the strong by mere dint of numbers under any protective system. She seems to desire the greatest good possible in the world, and her means to this end is the selection of the fittest, with the extermination of the less fit; the selection of the most highly organized in body, which includes the most highly organized in mind. In her care for the type she disregards individual men and individual races.

"The excellence of man himself is