proceeding. The only question was who should be first in seizing other people's land and destroying the inhabitants. All the governments not only most evidently infringed, and are infringing, the elementary demands of justice in relation to the conquered peoples, and in relation to one another, but they were guilty and continue to be guilty, of every kind of cheating, swindling, bribing, fraud, spying, robbery, and murder; and the peoples not only sympathised, and still sympathise, with them in all this, but they rejoice when it is their own government and not another government that commits such crimes.
The mutual enmity between the different peoples and States has reached, latterly, such amazing dimensions, that, notwithstanding the fact that there is no reason why one State should attack another, everyone knows that all the governments stand with their claws out and showing their teeth, and only waiting for someone to fall into trouble, or become weak, in order to tear him to pieces with as little risk as possible.
All the peoples of the so-called Christian world have been reduced by patriotism to such a state of brutality, that not only those who are obliged to kill or be killed desire slaughter and rejoice in murder, but all the people of Europe and America, living peaceably in their homes exposed to no danger, are, at each war—thanks to easy means of communication, and to the press—in the position of the spectators in
