Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/100

88 employments he has had on this planet, he has been largely occupied in killing his fellow-men. We have looked forward to an impending millennium of peace for the world. We Americans have assured ourselves that our country, strong in wealth and in numbers and in its remoteness from the great warring nations of Europe constantly watching each other in arms, would never be engaged in those wars that have decimated the human race through the boasted ages of civilization and Christianization. But what has befallen us? Our grandfathers passed through the long and wasting War of Independence; our fathers—a favored generation—had only the brief British and Mexican Wars; and, to compensate for this immunity, there fell upon us, the grandchildren, one of the most destructive and bloody wars of history. To this war the State in which I live contributed seventy-two thousand men—more than a tenth of its population, two thirds of its arms-bearing people. So far, even in this asylum of peace, war has made its demand on the human life of each successive generation.

The requisition which wars have made upon human life during the comparatively brief historic period is something frightful to contemplate, and this requisition has been decidedly upon one sex. It is true that myriads of women and children have perished in the massacres, famines, and pestilences that have supplemented battles and sieges; but it was nevertheless always the chief care of the fighters on both sides not to expose their women to these casualties, and the first condition of making men courageous soldiers is to assure them of the safety of wives and children.

To what is the exemption of women from military service due? The hasty answer may be, to their physical and mental unfitness. The physical strength of the average woman is perhaps twenty per cent less than that of the average man. This disparity could be readily adjusted by adapting the labor and discipline of the two classes of recruits to it. Make the regulation musket for the female regiments twenty per cent lighter than the standard, and so the personal baggage; and if twenty miles is a fair day's march for men soldiers, require of the women soldiers but fifteen miles. The nerves of women might more quickly than those of men succumb to the terror of shot and shell, or of a bayonet charge, but actual wounds and mutilations they would endure with more patience.

In the few instances of an exceptional custom preserved in history, natural disability had ceased to be a factor. There is a Greek legend of the Amazons, a race of women in Asia, so formidable as to terrorize all the early Grecian settlements, and to require such valorous heroes as Bellerophon and Hercules to subdue them. Travelers more trustworthy than Baron Munchausen