Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/423

Rh recruits are obtained chiefly from a certain class. We hear of a like trouble in another profession, a scarcity of young, educated, conscientious men desirous of entering the ministry, thought to be owing to the theological tenets to which they are required to subscribe. Both branches of the church in Scotland have accordingly endeavored to meet this problem by substituting less objectionable terms.

Perhaps from the public library young men have taken Carlyle and read how he describes the artisans of Britain and France: "Thirty stand fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'fire' is given, and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must bury and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart, were the entirest strangers; nay in so wide a universe there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! Their governors had fallen out, and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot."

Those who decline the advances of the decorated recruiting officer may have stumbled upon Professor MacMichael's address to the Peace Congress at Edinburgh, 1853, when he said: "The military profession is inconsistent with Christianity. The higher the rank and the greater the intellect, the more desperate the criminality. Here is a person upon whom God has conferred the rare gift of mathematical genius. If properly directed, what an abundant source of benefit to mankind! It might be employed in the construction of railways, by which the most distant parts of the world are brought into communication with each other. It might be employed in flashing the trembling lightning across the wires, making them the medium of intercourse between loving hearts thousands of miles apart; in increasing the wonderful powers of the steam-engine, relieving man from his exhausting toils; in application to the printing-press, sending light and knowledge to the farthest extremities of the earth. It might be employed in draining marshes, in supplying our towns and cities with water, and in adding to the health and happiness of men. It might lay down rules derived from the starry heavens, by which the mariner is guided through the wild wastes of waters in the darkest night. How noble is science when thus directed, but in the same proportion how debasing does it become when directed to human destruction! It is as if a chemist were to make use of his knowledge not to cure the diseases of which humanity is suffering, but to poison the springs of existence. The scientific soldier cultivates his endowments for what purpose? That he may determine the precise direction at which these batteries may vomit forth their fire so as to destroy most property and most lives; that he may calculate