The professional soldier had ceased to be a European feature ere the twentieth century had run out. The remarkable, simple, and indeed somewhat sudden and even unexpected way in which international war came to its end—became, in fact, a practical impossibility, as between, at least, the chief civilized powers, from the practice, which came to be adopted in common, of training, all their respective youth to military drill, and the effective defensive use of the modern arms of precision—is one of the striking incidents with which my retrospect will have presently to deal. I will only meanwhile remark, that the effect of this result upon the civilized world's sentiment, and the mutual intercourse of its societies, and upon the entire world's general forward advance, could hardly be overrated.
No cause of our past progress was more real or more visible, during, at least, the earlier centuries of my retrospect, than that reforming and reconstructing spirit, which was introduced into all trade union life by its illustrious leader and renovator, Yellowly. It was Yellowly's proud prediction that his class-fellows were to take the van of future progress, and that, to this end, trade union law would be even stricter than the public law itself, and trade union economic views and practice more unchallengeable than the dicta of economic professors; and he survived far enough into the twentieth century to see these ardent hopes in fair way to fulfilment.
