a nation dates its moral regeneration from a defeat that seemed to shatter it. Russia emancipated her serfs because she was beaten before Sebastopol; Austria tore up her Concordat and liberalised her government because she was vanquished at Solferino; France rid herself of the impurities of the Second Empire at the price of Sedan. There are also communities that have been the better for success. The United States became a nation with a consciousness of great destiny and of her duty towards the human race after the War of Independence. Italy conquered liberty and self-respect on the same battlefields. We may stop short of the splendid paradox of De Maistre, that war is divine in virtue of its supernatural results,[1] and content ourselves with believing that it has its place in the economy of human society, as volcanoes and earthquakes have in the physical world. It took all the courage of Voltaire, less than a century and a half ago, to explain that an earthquake was not necessarily the judgment of God upon an immoral city.[2] At present not even a theologian sees anything outrageous in Herschel's statement that " earthquakes may form part and parcel of some great scheme of Providential arrangement which is at work for good and not for ill."[3] It seems not unreasonable to suppose that a warlike spirit is as inseparable from human nature as the love of money or sexual impulse, and that like these it may have its uses, though its excess is lamentable.
- ↑ "La guerre est divine par ses conséquences d'un ordre surnaturel; tant générales, que particulières."—De Maistre, Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, Septième Entretien.
- ↑
"Direz-vous en voyant cet amas de victimes,
Dieu s'est venge; leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?"
Voltaire, Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne. - ↑ Herschel's Familiar Lectures, p. 2.
