WAR AND CIVILIZATION. 767 



strained that the military point of view dominated every other, 

 the Government regarding the people, as has been said, in no other 

 light than as " a taxable and soldier-yielding mass." " While," 

 as Mr. Spencer observes, " the militant part of the community had 

 greatly developed, the industrial jjart had approached toward the 

 condition of a permanent commissariat. By conscription and the 

 press gangs was carried to a relatively vast extent that sacrifice 

 of the citizen in life and liberty which war entails. . . . Irrespon- 

 sible agents of the executive were empowered to suppress public 

 meetings and seize their leaders, death being the punishment for 

 those who did not disperse when ordered. Libraries and news- 

 rooms could not be opened without license ; and it was penal to 

 lend books without permission. Booksellers dared not publish 

 books by obnoxious authors." * It was during this period that 

 the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth found themselves being 

 tracked by a detective in their walks through the country lanes 

 of Somersetshire, the meditative manner and earnest discourse of 

 the two bards doubtless impressing the intelligent minion, of the 

 law with the idea that they must be hatching revolutionary 

 schemes. With the re-establishment of peace on a secure founda- 

 tion liberty revived ; and domestic legislation began to assume a 

 distinctly humane and beneficent character. The penal code was 

 greatly ameliorated, the long list of capital ofi^enses being reduced 

 till there remained but one, and the pillory and imprisonment for 

 debt being abolished. Penalties and disabilities for religious dis- 

 sent Avere gradually removed ; the franchise was enlarged ; muni- 

 cipal reform was inaugurated ; the corn laws were abolished ; free 

 trade was introduced, liberty of the press established, and the po- 

 lice system of the kingdom greatly improved. These are the works 

 and triumphs of civilization, and they flowed in almost unbroken 

 streams as soon as the nation had recovered from the effects of its 

 prodigious military efforts. 



But, another change is now in progress, induced partly by the 

 extreme tension of the Continental situation, and partly by cir- 

 cumstances peculiar to the present time. The apostle James in 

 his day gave a very summary answer to the question, " Whence 

 come wars and fightings among you ? " " Come they not hence," 

 he said, " even of your lusts that war in your members ? " A re- 

 cent article in the London Spectator, under the title of The New 

 Form of International Greed, might almost be taken for a com- 

 mentary on this text. What the journal in question points out is 

 that while in past times the greed of nations was for territory 

 without special regard to its wealth-producing properties, the 

 greed to-day is for actual wealth and for such territory as is ex- 



* Principles of Sociology, vol. ii, p. 626. 



