828 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gration may exist. But emigration under barbarian conditions 

 does not usually bring peoples into contact, except it be the harsh 

 contact of war. The only peaceful contact is the commercial one. 

 Merchants, undoubtedly, in early times penetrated foreign tribes 

 and nations, and brought home, in addition to their wares, stories 

 of what they had seen and learned abroad. But the merchants 

 were too few, too ignorant and prejudiced, and too little given to 

 observation, to spread much useful information in this way ; and 

 their peoples were too self-satisfied to give up any customs and be- 

 liefs of their own for those thus brought them. 



How, then, could any effective result from national contact be 

 produced ? In primitive times the only effective agency must 

 have been that of war. Destructive as this is in its results, it has 

 the one useful effect of thoroughly commingling diverse peoples, 

 bringing them into the closest contact with each other, and forc- 

 ing upon the attention of each the advantages possessed by the 

 other. The caldron of human society must be set boiling before 

 its contents can fully mingle and combine. War is the furnace 

 in which this ebullition takes place, and through whose activity 

 human ideas are forced to circulate through and through the 

 minds of men. , 



But there is a special cause that renders war peculiarly effect- 

 ive in this direction. In every war there are two peoples to be 

 considered, the invaders and the invaded. The latter remains at 

 home, on the defensive, its government intact, its prejudices con- 

 densed by hatred of the invaders, its people strongly bent on both 

 mental and material resistance. The invaders, on the contrary, 

 not only leave their country behind them, but they leave its laws 

 and conditions as well. They march under new skies, over new 

 soils, through new climates. They come into the closest contact 

 with new customs, laws, and conditions. And their local preju- 

 dices only partially march with them. The laws of the peaceful 

 state are abrogated in the army. Its members are brought under 

 other laws and disciplines. Religious influences weaken. A sense 

 of liberty fills the mind of the soldier ; expectancy arises ; new 

 hopes and fears are engendered ; the old quiet devotion to law be- 

 comes a tendency to license. 



Thus the mind of the soldier is in a state essentially unlike 

 that of the peaceful citizen. The one is heated where the other is 

 cool ; expectancy in the one replaces the fixed prejudice of the 

 other ; a tendency to license and insubordination in the one re- 

 places the law-abiding disposition of the other. The intellect of 

 the soldier is therefore in a state rendering it a quick and ready 

 solvent of new experiences. All its fixity of ideas is broken up, 

 the deep foundations of its prejudices are shaken, it is in a recep- 

 tive condition ; fresh thoughts readily pass the broken barriers of 



