Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/246

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232
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

invasions of the French, Spanish, and German armies, "had brought want to their boards, infamy to their beds, fire to their roofs, and the knife to their throats." But there was never a people that practiced the ethics of war against their enemies that did not practice the same code against themselves. The members of the tipper classes prey upon the members of the lower, and the members of each class prey upon one another. Everywhere there are deceit, baseness, cruelty, and every crime of violence. "No language," says Draper, speaking of the condition of Rome, "can describe the state of that capital after the civil wars. . . . The social fabric was a festering mass of rottenness. The people had become a populace; the aristocracy was demoniac; the city was hell.!No crime that the annals of human wickedness can show was left unperpetrated—remorseless murders; the betrayal of parents, husbands, wives, friends; poisoning reduced to a system; adultery degenerating into incest, and crimes that can not be written." But a like demoralization was the fruit of the civil war in England and the long wars in France, Germany, and Italy. It is not, therefore, at the door of Adam but at the door of Mars that the sins of the world are to be placed; they are not due to the fall in Eden but to the plunder and murder on the field of battle.

II.

Thus far I have indicated how war leads directly, inevitably, and invariably to despotism in government, ignorance and intolerance in political and religious thought, and crime and degradation in social life. Let me turn to the fruits of peace, which include all that constitutes civilization. The connection between the two is likewise direct, inevitable, and invariable. Wherever peace stays the hand of destruction and resumes the work of creation, forces are put in operation that transform the thoughts and feelings as completely as they transform the pursuits, manners, and institutions of men. Released from the burdens and insecurity of war, society, like a body delivered from the fever and waste of disease, revives and grows strong. Industries flourish. Pressing against the cords with which the state and church have bound them, they pant and struggle for freedom. The mind responds also to the new life. Becoming enlarged with the enlargement of its activities, it refuses to submit to the bondage in which political and ecclesiastical despotism has placed it. It insists upon exploring every nook and corner of the universe and bringing to light every discovery. It rejects traditions and superstitions, and proceeds to construct the splendid edifice known as modern science. At the same time, it manifests its joy in creations of the imagination—poetry, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. These pursuits of peace introduce new relations among men. Indus-