Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/847

Rh mind, and to a people intoxicated with, military glory, it was justification enough, that their defeated enemy was showing great powers of recuperation. The moral sense of Europe was shocked by this cynicism; but if war is such a beautiful thing as some pretend, and so useful an instrument of Divine Providence, how can we be sure that any war is to be condemned?

If we look at France, can we say that she has profited greatly by the ordeal passed through? An indirect result of the war was a change in her form of government, and considering the fundamental instability of the Napoleonic régime this must be counted a permanent advantage. The change had to come, and it was well that it was hastened. If, however, we look for signs of moral or intellectual improvement in the nation at large it is doubtful whether we shall find them. The politics of the country has been honeycombed by corruption; so that more than once it has seemed as if the people, sick of the misdeeds of their legislators and full of contempt for the whole parliamentary system, were on the point of sending the Third Republic packing after the first two, and making another desperate experiment with some "savior of society." If we consult the literature of the day, we certainly see no signs of moral advance. If such up-to-date writers as Paul Hervieu and "Gyp" may be trusted, the higher walks of society could hardly be more abandoned than they are to greed, luxury, and lust. Education has been making rapid progress, and so has crime; while the financial burdens of the state go on increasing at a portentous rate. The nation has doubtless learned from its calamities some lessons of self-restraint; and, as we have said, it has escaped from an essentially bad form of government, but it is difficult to assign any other beneficial results to the terrible scourging it received in the war with Germany. Comparing it, however, with the latter country, it seems to have suffered almost less from its defeats than the latter from its victories.

Crossing the Channel, we see a country which, though not unaffected by the increase of the military spirit which has marked the last quarter of a century, illustrates in a broad way the advantages as regards individual liberty and civilization in general which flow from at least a relative aversion to war. For forty years the British nation has waged no war in Europe, nor any war abroad that has at all seriously taxed its strength: and the methods of the government and the habits of the people are consequently more in harmony with a régime of peace and industry than is the case in any of the continental nations. Interferences with individual liberty which on the Continent would be taken as a matter of course would in England be resented as acts of tyranny. One of the chief marks of the industrial, as opposed to the military, régime, according to Herbert Spencer, is that under it