Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/150

140 of the institutions men have built up. It will be a survey of the stream of social history, its whirls and eddies, rapids and still waters, and the effect of each and all of its condtionsconditions [sic] on the heredity of men. The survival of the fit and the unfit in all degrees and conditions will be its subject matter. This book will be written, not roughly and hastily, like the present fragmentary essay, still less will it be a brilliant effort of some analytical imagination. It will set down soberly and statistically the array of facts which as yet no one possesses, and the new Darwin whose work it shall be must, like his predecessor, spend twenty-five years in the gathering of 'all facts that can possibly bear on the question.' When such a book is written, we shall know for the first time the real significance of war.

XLIV. If any war is good, civil war must be best. The virtues of victory and the lessons of defeat would be kept within the nation. This would protect the nation from the temptation to fight for gold or trade. Civil war under proper limitations could remedy this. A time limit could be adopted, as in football, and every device known to the arena could be used to get the good of war and to escape its evils.

For example, of all our States New York and Illinois have doubtless suffered most from the evils of peace, if peace has evils which disappear with war. They could be pitted against each other, while the other States looked on. The 'dark and bloody ground' of Kentucky could be made the arena. This would not interfere with trade in Chicago, nor soil the streets in Baltimore. The armies could be filled up from the ranks of the unemployed, while the pasteboard heroes of the national guard could act as officers. All could be done in decency and order, with no recriminations and no oppression of an alien foe. We should have all that is good in war, its pomp and circumstance, the 'grim resolution of the London clubs,' without wars long train of murderous evils. Who could deny this? And yet who could defend it?

If war is good, we should have it regardless of its cost, regardless of its horrors, its sorrows, its anguish, havoc and waste.

But it is bad, only to be justified as the last resort of 'mangled, murdered liberty,' a terrible agency to be evoked only when all other arts of self-defense shall fail. The remedy for most ills of men is not to be sought in 'whirlwinds of rebellion that shake the world,' but in peace and justice, equality among men, and the cultivation of those virtues we call Christian, because they have been virtues ever since man and society began, and will be virtues still when the era of strife is past, and the 'redcoat bully in his boots' no longer 'hides the march of man from us.'

It is the voice of political wisdom which falls from the bells of Christmas-tide: "Peace on earth; good will towards men!"