Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/845

Rh is the blessing and benefit that some pretend, the logical thing would be to have war for war's sake, quite independently even of so flimsy a pretext as the Venezuela boundary. Then, by a due course of murder and rapine, we could train our youth to virtue, our army contractors to public spirit and honesty, our newspaper writers to modesty and truthfulness, our legislators to a lofty patriotism, and everybody else to a correspondingly high moral level.

War is the avenger of the faults of civilization; but, like other avengers, it is too furious to be discriminating. It may sweep a certain amount of "rubbish to the void," but none the less are the brain and brawn and heart of noble manhood crushed under its relentless feet. It may destroy some of "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace," but it blights at the same time the fairest promise of the age, and extinguishes its brightest hopes. There are virtues developed in the battlefield and the bivouac; but how much of virtue perishes in the slaughter of the battle or moans itself away within hospital walls! It is easy to talk glibly of the benefits of war; but if we seriously consider the havoc it makes in homes and hearts, and the horrible sufferings of every kind that it entails, not to mention the check that it gives to peaceful industry, and the burdens that it imposes on future generations, the benefits in question will appear very unsubstantial in comparison.

Concrete examples will, however, serve our purpose here better than any amount of generalizing. Twenty-five years ago there was a great and bloody war—of course the bloodier a war is the more we may expect from it—between France and Germany. We may, therefore, advantageously study the effect of the struggle upon both nations, and as regards one of them, Germany, we have the facts of the case ready to our hand in an article by A. Eubule Evans in the February number of the Contemporary Review. The first result which this writer, who is far from wanting in sympathy with the German people, notices is that their national self-consciousness and susceptibility are greatly increased. They wish now to exclude all foreign words from their language, even from the language of commerce, in which it is a decided advantage to have as many words as possible of world-wide signification. Before the war the French word "billet" was commonly used for a railway ticket; now it is banished in favor of "Fahrkarte." Before the war there was a disposition to abandon the crabbed German character, and use the open Roman print, common to the rest of Europe; to-day that idea, we are informed, is tabooed. "The old letters have become the symbol of patriotism, and no one talks of discarding them." So German eyes must suffer, and additional difficulty must be thrown in the way of the