suffer a yet more perplexing and painful lapse into barbarism. Looking round the whole circuit of Christendom, we perceive, not only symptoms of disturbance and imminent peril of a general war in Europe, but a character of barbarism in both the warfare itself, and in the political facts which occasion it, which make us ask whether we are really living in the nineteenth century, and in the Commercial Period of civilisation.
What ought we, on philosophical grounds, to be seeing? And what are we actually seeing?
We ought to be seeing the foremost nations of the world out of danger from despotic rule: growing comfortable, through all their social ranks, by progressive industry and arts, wrangling, no doubt, and sometimes fighting with one another, but for new kinds of quarrel, and in a spirit very different from that of the Middle Ages. Such quarrels as there are should be for the possession of the few remaining mouths of rivers (if any in fact now remain) for the establishment of colonies; or from jealousies about the exploration of new countries or wild tribes; or from encroachments on the safety of the seas, or on treaty rights for commercial objects. There might be rivalries about discovering geographical mysteries, or about cutting through isthmuses; there might be difficulties about slave traffic, or about tolls on straits, or about the freedom of great rivers, or about rights of fishery. There might be plenty of strife, we were told, and armies and navies would be honourable institutions for a generation or two to come: but we should see no more wars of sheer tyranny,—no more territorial wars,—no more fighting for fighting’s sake, on any pretence or none.
Now, what is it that we do see?
We see warfare for the old reasons, in an age when such reasons require disguise to pass the ordeal of public opinion at all, or are too flagrant to permit any appeal to opinion at all. We see warfare assuming a character of ferocity and barbarism which was pronounced a disgrace four centuries ago. It is true, we see men and nations less hasty in plunging into war; but, once in for it, their temper is of a lower quality than it was during the Military Period, when a state of peace is rather the exception than the rule with the European nations, as with the less-advanced races of men.
We see, first, the great Military Power of all—Russia—apparently going to pieces, and becoming ferocious in proportion to her weakness. This may be fairly called a confirmation of the theory of philosophers, because Russia can neither conquer in arms, nor prosper in peace—from poverty and exhaustion, from want of a commercial middle class, and of capital, and trade, and manufacturing interests, and agricultural improvement, and the popular education which attends on these pursuits. It is because Russia is a military power in a non-military age, that she is sinking into ruin. But then there is the fact of the unparalleled ferocity of her mode of warfare,—and of her mode of governing,—a barbarity which makes us throw down our newspapers from inability to bear the mere reading of what she is daily doing and inflicting. Then there is France,—a Military Power also, but something else as well. We see there a people actually longing for peace, but unable to get it. We see there a people deplorably backward in agriculture, and poverty stricken accordingly in its peasant class; a people advancing rapidly in manufacturing industry, and leading the whole world in certain arts of ornamentation; a people weary of debt and taxation,—weeping at home over the conscription, and shuddering at the bloodshed, and trembling at the arrival of news from any quarter; yet a people whose armies are fighting on all the continents, and threatening to fight for any of the islands of the globe. We see them rushing to the war in Italy, and, instead of finishing it off, keeping up the strife between Rome and the Italian nation, sustaining a brigandage as horrible as any known five centuries ago. We see them preventing any part of Europe from settling down in the repose of peace, and for ever menacing some neighbour with assault or interference. We see them pouring out blood and treasure in an incomprehensible war in Asia, as they have already done in Africa, in the unseasonable attempt to found a colony on a military basis; and, as if Algiers and Cochin China were not costly and destructive enough, we see them perpetrating the most inexcusable of invasions in America,—bearing down with the whole weight of their military power on Mexico, with no more pretence of right than any warrior tribe of the Middle Ages.
To pass rapidly over the rest:—we have seen Spain show herself retrograde in her invasion of the Moors, and in her support of the slave-trade, and in her insensibility to commercial honour, both in retaining the money which was paid her for abolishing that trade, and in so failing to pay the interest of her debts as to be excluded from the exchanges of all Europe. We see the ruler of Prussia appealing to arms as the foundation and support of his throne, and sustaining Russia in her tyranny, and picking a quarrel with Denmark in order to obtain a field for warfare. We see a strife growing to such a deadly strength between the Christian races and the Turks in the east of Europe that nobody doubts that one of the ferocious old religious wars will come up again, to disgust and terrify humanity. We see the Head of Christendom claiming powers and immunities which the age cannot permit, and living and working in a spirit of vindictiveness, pride, and complicity with cruelty which make the world ask what the Papacy now has to do with Christianity.—On the other Christian continent, we see the fiercest civil war raging that has occurred in human history. No war ever has been, or ever could be, more malignant in its spirit,—and none more wantonly and unpardonably entered upon than the revolt of the Slave States against the Free States of the American Union: and in destructiveness it is unequalled in history.
Such is the aspect of the combative part of Christendom in the nineteenth century of its date. If it was before, an eager question why the rise of the Christian religion, with its morality, did not arrest the decline and prevent the fall of the Roman empire, it may well be the most interesting of questions now, how Christendom itself—the