Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/848

830 of war as a civilizing agency. This is, that the greater the diversity in conditions between two warring nations, the greater is their mutual benefit. Civil wars usually yield but small results in this direction. Few new experiences are gained. It is but the commingling of two similar fluids. Yet in a case like that of our American civil war, where the existence of widely different conditions in two opposed sections of the country is the determining cause of the war, very important advantages to civilization may be gained. It would have taken many years of peace to produce as strong a feeling of the moral obliquity of slavery as was produced in four years of war. The heated minds of our people received the doctrine of abolitionism as a river of new thought, where before it had been but a trickling rivulet. And the overflow of this new thought is gradually making itself felt in the South, despite the fact that the conquerors have left them to their previous isolation.

Thus it is not only the soldier's mind that is heated and receptive; the same condition, in a lesser degree, exists in the nation for whose benefit the army is fighting. The souls of the people march, if their bodies do not, with the army. They are excited, hopeful, eager to participate in its booty, and ready to be influenced by its experiences. And when the conquerors return with spoils in their hands, and new thoughts, beliefs, and aspirations in their minds, they mingle intimately with a people eager to participate in their gains, and in a mental condition highly receptive to their new ideas. The more diverse these from the previous mental state of the people, the greater is the warping influence upon the national mind, and the more decided are the new conceptions attained. Nor in any such case does the conquering race simply lift itself toward the level of the conquered. If we cause oxygen and hydrogen to combine, the result is not oxygen or hydrogen, but water. And, in like manner, the mingling of two diverse grades of thought yields a compound that resembles neither of its constituents, but is a new phase of civilization, a positive step forward in progress.

Thus the world progressed through its long ages of partial civilization. The combined experiences of the members of a tribe yielded a certain degree of advancement, and there stopped. Each tribe differed from all others to the extent that its experiences and their resulting ideas differed. During peace the tribes repelled each other and remained intact, each with its special form of mental progress. In war they overflowed each other, greatly diversified thoughts and habits were brought into intimate contact, new ideas were engendered from the mixture, new forms of civilization arose. And as war was almost incessant, so these new products of thought were constantly brought into existence.