Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/843

Rh development of humanitarian feeling have within the last fifty years very greatly increased the difficulties in the way of war, and powerfully inclined nations to regulate their relations with one another on principles of equity. Where is this process to stop? There is evidently a radical contradiction between the appeal to reason and the appeal to force; and if the habit of appealing to reason is gaining strength day by day, can we believe that the nations will go on indefinitely making preparations on the most enormous scale for the other mode of arbitrament? "One thing is clear," says De Quincey, "that when all the causes of war involving manifest injustice are banished by the force of opinion focally converged upon the subject the range of war will be prodigiously circumscribed." It is a great satisfaction to know that things are most distinctly moving in this direction. As a much more recent author, M. Ernest Lavisse, in his admirable little book, entitled A General View of the Political History of Europe, observes: "The ambition of territorial aggrandizement is tempered by a certain modesty. At the present day no sovereign would dare to undertake annexations on pretexts such as Louis XIV gave before attacking Spain in 1667, or Frederick II in 1740 after invading Silesia. If Poland's existence, miserable as it was, had been prolonged a few decades, her destruction would perhaps have been impossible."

That wars have directly or indirectly resulted in some advantage to the world in past times, it would be vain to deny; and that their role of usefulness even between so-called civilized nations is wholly and forever at an end, it would not be safe to assert. This, however, may be said, that if war ensues between two such nations, it is owing not to their civilization in any true sense, but to some lack in the civilization of one or other or both—some predominance of the spirit of greed, some inaccessibility to the dictates of reason, some fault of domestic government by which the crude passions and ignorant prejudices of the multitude or possibly the interested and partial views of a governing class, are allowed undue sway, some national overweeningness, some aberration of public opinion. War in such a case teaches sharp and much-needed lessons; but, unfortunately, it does not invariably advance the cause of justice. It shows where power resides, but does not always indicate the right. It may chasten where chastening was less needed, and exalt the pride of those who already were too insolent. Whatever evil it may destroy, it leaves new-created evil in its path. All we can hope is that, upon the whole, the education of the world may be advanced by the dire experience. We need not, however, laud war on this account, any more than we laud the epidemic which, taking its origin in neglect of sanitary principles, attacks by preference the weakly