Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/846

828 may exist. But emigration under barbarian conditions does not usually bring peoples into contact, except it be the harsh contact of war. The only peaceful contact is the commercial one. Merchants, undoubtedly, in early times penetrated foreign tribes and nations, and brought home, in addition to their wares, stories of what they had seen and learned abroad. But the merchants were too few, too ignorant and prejudiced, and too little given to observation, to spread much useful information in this way; and their peoples were too self-satisfied to give up any customs and beliefs of their own for those thus brought them.

How, then, could any effective result from national contact be produced? In primitive times the only effective agency must have been that of war. Destructive as this is in its results, it has the one useful effect of thoroughly commingling diverse peoples, bringing them into the closest contact with each other, and forcing upon the attention of each the advantages possessed by the other. The caldron of human society must be set boiling before its contents can fully mingle and combine. War is the furnace in which this ebullition takes place, and through whose activity human ideas are forced to circulate through and through the minds of men.

But there is a special cause that renders war peculiarly effective in this direction. In every war there are two peoples to be considered, the invaders and the invaded. The latter remains at home, on the defensive, its government intact, its prejudices condensed by hatred of the invaders, its people strongly bent on both mental and material resistance. The invaders, on the contrary, not only leave their country behind them, but they leave its laws and conditions as well. They march under new skies, over new soils, through new climates. They come into the closest contact with new customs, laws, and conditions. And their local prejudices only partially march with them. The laws of the peaceful state are abrogated in the army. Its members are brought under other laws and disciplines. Religious influences weaken. A sense of liberty fills the mind of the soldier; expectancy arises; new hopes and fears are engendered; the old quiet devotion to law becomes a tendency to license.

Thus the mind of the soldier is in a state essentially unlike that of the peaceful citizen. The one is heated where the other is cool; expectancy in the one replaces the fixed prejudice of the other; a tendency to license and insubordination in the one replaces the law-abiding disposition of the other. The intellect of the soldier is therefore in a state rendering it a quick and ready solvent of new experiences. All its fixity of ideas is broken up, the deep foundations of its prejudices are shaken, it is in a receptive condition; fresh thoughts readily pass the broken barriers of