Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/140

130 XXVI. A recent French cartoon pictures the peasant of a hundred years ago plowing in a field, a gilded marquis on his back, tapping his gilded snuff-box. Another cartoon shows the French peasant of to-day, still at the plow. On his back is an armed soldier who should be at another plow, while on the back of the soldier rides the second burden of Shylock the money-lender, more cruel and more heavy even than the dainty marquis of the old régime. So long as war remains, the burden of France cannot be shifted.

XXVII. In the loss of war we count not alone the man who falls or whose life is tainted with disease. There is more than one in the man's life. The bullet that pierces his heart goes to the heart of at least one other. For each soldier has a sweetheart, and the beat of these die, too—so far as the race is concerned—if they remain single for his sake.

In the old Scottish ballad of the 'Flower of the Forest' this thought is set forth:

 I've heard the lilting at each ewe-milking Lassies a-lilting before the dawn of day. But now they are moaning, on ilka green loaning, For the 'Flower of the Forest' is a' wed away."

Ruskin once said that 'War is the foundation of all high virtues and faculties of men.' As well might the maker of phrases say that fire is the builder of the forest, for only in the flame of destruction do we realize the warmth and strength that lie in the heart of oak. Another writer, Hardwick, declares that 'War is essential to the life of a nation; war strengthens a nation morally, mentally and physically.' Such statements as these set all history at defiance. War can only waste and corrupt. 'All war is bad,' says Benjamin Franklin, 'some only worse than others.' 'War has its origin in the evil passions of men,' and even when unavoidable or righteous, its effects are most forlorn. The final effect of each strife for empire has been the degradation or extinction of the nation which led in the struggle.

XXIX. Greece died because the men who made her glory had all passed away and left none of their kin, and therefore none of their kind. 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more,' for the Greek of today, for the most part, never came from the loins of Leonidas or Miltiades. He is the son of the stable-boys and scullions and slaves of the day of her glory, those of whom imperial Greece could make no use in her conquest of Asia. "Most of the old Greek race," says Mr. W. H. Ireland, has been swept away, and the country is now inhabited by persons of Slavonic descent. Indeed, there is strong ground for the statement that there was more of the old heroic blood of Hellas in the Turkish army of Edhem Pasha than in the soldiers of King George, who fled before them three years ago." King George himself is only