88 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



employments lie has had on this planet, he has been largely occu- 

 pied in killing his fellow-men. We have looked forward to an 

 impending millennium of peace for the world. We Americans 

 have assured ourselves that our country, strong in wealth and in 

 numbers and in its remoteness from the great warring nations of 

 Europe constantly watching each other in arms, would never be 

 engaged in those wars that have decimated the human race 

 through the boasted ages of civilization and Christianization. 

 But what has befallen us ? Our grandfathers passed through the 

 long and wasting War of Independence ; our fathers — a favored 

 generation — had only the brief British and Mexican Wars ; and, 

 to compensate for this immunity, there fell upon us, the grand- 

 children, one of the most destructive and bloody wars of history. 

 To this war the State in which I live contributed seventy-two 

 thousand men — more than a tenth of its population, two thirds of 

 its arms-bearing people. So far, even in this asylum of peace, 

 war has made its demand on the human life of each successive 

 generation. 



The requisition which wars have made upon human life dur- 

 ing the comparatively brief historic period is something frightful 

 to contemplate, and this requisition has been decidedly upon one 

 sex. It is true that myriads of women and children have perished 

 in the massacres, famines, and pestilences that have supplemented 

 battles and sieges ; but it was nevertheless always the chief care 

 of the jfighters on both sides not to expose their women to these 

 casualties, and the first condition of making men courageous sol- 

 diers is to assure them of the safety of wives and children. 



To what is the exemption of women from military service due ? 

 The hasty answer may be, to their physical and mental unfitness. 

 The physical strength of the average woman is perhaps twenty 

 per cent less than that of the average man. This disparity could 

 be readily adjusted by adapting the labor and discipline of the 

 two classes of recruits to it. Make the regulation musket for the 

 female regiments twenty per cent lighter than the standard, and 

 so the personal baggage ; and if twenty miles is a fair day's march 

 for men soldiers, require of the women soldiers but fifteen miles. 

 The nerves of women might more quickly than those of men suc- 

 cumb to the terror of shot and shell, or of a bayonet charge, but 

 actual wounds and mutilations they would endure with more 

 patience. 



In the few instances of an exceptional custom preserved in 

 history, natural disability had ceased to be a factor. There is a 

 Greek legend of the Amazons, a race of women in Asia, so for- 

 midable as to terrorize all the early Grecian settlements, and to 

 require such valorous heroes as Bellerophon and Hercules to sub- 

 due them. Travelers more trustworthy than Baron Munchausen 



