Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/849

Rh strained that the military point of view dominated every other, the Government regarding the people, as has been said, in no other light than as "a taxable and soldier-yielding mass." "While," as Mr. Spencer observes, "the militant part of the community had greatly developed, the industrial part had approached toward the condition of a permanent commissariat. By conscription and the press gangs was carried to a relatively vast extent that sacrifice of the citizen in life and liberty which war entails. . . . Irresponsible agents of the executive were empowered to suppress public meetings and seize their leaders, death being the punishment for those who did not disperse when ordered. Libraries and newsrooms could not be opened without license; and it was penal to lend books without permission. Booksellers dared not publish books by obnoxious authors." It was during this period that the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth found themselves being tracked by a detective in their walks through the country lanes of Somersetshire, the meditative manner and earnest discourse of the two bards doubtless impressing the intelligent minion, of the law with the idea that they must be hatching revolutionary schemes. With the re-establishment of peace on a secure foundation liberty revived; and domestic legislation began to assume a distinctly humane and beneficent character. The penal code was greatly ameliorated, the long list of capital offenses being reduced till there remained but one, and the pillory and imprisonment for debt being abolished. Penalties and disabilities for religious dissent were gradually removed; the franchise was enlarged; municipal reform was inaugurated; the corn laws were abolished; free trade was introduced, liberty of the press established, and the police system of the kingdom greatly improved. These are the works and triumphs of civilization, and they flowed in almost unbroken streams as soon as the nation had recovered from the effects of its prodigious military efforts.

But, another change is now in progress, induced partly by the extreme tension of the Continental situation, and partly by circumstances peculiar to the present time. The apostle James in his day gave a very summary answer to the question, "Whence come wars and fightings among you?" "Come they not hence," he said, "even of your lusts that war in your members?" A recent article in the London Spectator, under the title of The New Form of International Greed, might almost be taken for a commentary on this text. What the journal in question points out is that while in past times the greed of nations was for territory without special regard to its wealth-producing properties, the greed to-day is for actual wealth and for such territory as is