8i8 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



treasure, blood, and life. He says mil- 

 lions of men all over Europe are at this 

 moment idling away their time in de- 

 moralizing barrack-life, trained among 

 much physical and mental deprivation 

 to no art but that of destroying each 

 other skillfully, which is much as if they 

 had been usefully employed and the 

 products of their labor then cast into 

 the sea. We are reminded of the im- 

 mense amount of work bestowed upon 

 a first-class ironclad, which is liable to 

 be sent to the bottom in an instant. 

 She may have cost $2,000,000 and her 

 equipment another half million; so that 

 if the ordinary laboring man earns 

 $250 a year, on the average of twenty 

 years of working life we have the whole 

 life's labor of 500 men destroyed by the 

 single loss of such a ship. Blood and 

 health are precious ; war spills the for- 

 mer and impairs and destroys the latter 

 on an appalling scale. As to the waste 

 of life, it is of course incalculable ; yet, 

 if there be a money estimate of it, the 

 result is shocking. Laboring men are 

 capital in society, and it is a very mod- 

 erate estimate to assume them from 

 this point of view as worth $2,500 a 

 piece. A battle, therefore, in Avhich 

 20,000 men are killed, annihilates $50,- 

 000,000 of capital in human beings alone. 

 The sufferings of war are conceded 

 to be indescribable. Mr. Earn remarks : 

 " Of all incidents of battle the one which 

 impresses itself most strongly on my 

 imagination is that of Borodino, where 

 60,000 French and Eussians were left 

 upon the ground; the groans of the 

 wounded in the ensuing night sounded 

 at a distance like the roar of the sea. 

 The far-off listener might expect to 

 hear outcries of pain and distress from 

 such a scene, that screams of agony 

 should arise from instant to instant, and 

 that the doleful, piercing note should be 

 taken up from this point and from that, 

 and that night should be made hideous 

 by this inarticulate misery. But here 

 w^as no such intermittent lamentation. 

 From amid 20,000 corpses arose a 



hoarse, uniform, unceasing roll of the 

 anguish of 40,000 men ! " 



How, then, are we to regard these 

 practices? Our author says that we 

 must turn to Nature to find how she re- 

 gards such things. Is war an exception 

 to her course, or does she regard men 

 fighting as a naturalist looks on tribes 

 of ants destroying each other ? The an- 

 swer is, that Nature is absolutely piti- 

 less. Her eyes never fill with tears. 

 She multiplies to destroy, and destroys 

 without mercy. 



"Her taller trees debar the meaner 

 shrubs from sun and breeze. It is no- 

 thing to her that the more lowly plants 

 in the forest wither and pine for light 

 and air. It is her will that the weak- 

 est should go to the w^all. Eavin is the 

 condition of the existence of half her 

 creatures; and at this moment, as all 

 around tins sea-girt ball the strong ani- 

 mals prey upon the weak for their daily 

 sustenance, more skins are being pierced 

 and torn, more bones being crushed, 

 more blood being shed, in the far-off 

 places of the earth than twenty Eusso- 

 Turkish wars going on together would 

 involve. Are we to be told that Nature 

 enjoins these things, and yet is out- 

 raged by men tearing and rending each 

 other? Still she is not simply indif- 

 ferent. She appears to have a pur- 

 pose in all this. She knows that the 

 world is not rich enough for all. She 

 keeps it upon principle in a condition 

 of over-population. She thinks it bet- 

 ter that the strong should crowd out 

 the weak than that the weak should 

 crowd out the strong by mere dint of 

 numbers under any protective system. 

 She seems to desire the greatest good 

 possible in the world, and her means to 

 this end is the selection of the fittest, 

 with the extermination of the less fit ; 

 the selection of the most highly organ- 

 ized in body, which includes the most 

 highly organized in mind. In her care 

 for the type she disregards individual 

 men and individual races. 



" The excellence of man himself i-s 



