hodder: the duty of the scholar in politics. 75 



dred and fifty-six Union soldiers died in Southern prisons and thirty 

 thousand one hundred and fifty-two Confederate soldiers died in 

 Northern prisons, within four of the same number on both sides. 



"Who can calculate," says the same writer, "the awful mass of 

 human misery that these figures represent?. . . .Comparatively few 

 of those that perish die upon the battle field. Thousands succumb 

 from sheer exhaustion, having endured for weeks, perhaps months, 

 the slow agony of failing strength, under the influence of privation 

 and over-exertion. Thousands die of disease, many of them for 

 want of the commonest comforts of the sick. Starvation demands 

 one host of victims, fever another, neglected wounds a third. 

 Vice of all kinds preys upon the soldiery and exacts its terrible toll 

 of moral and physical ruin. Even well appointed and victorious 

 armies melt away under the influence of sickness and fatigue unless 

 constantly reinforced. What then must be the case with a broken 

 or retreating army, an army separated from its supplies or cooped 

 up in a beleaguered fortress? Let the three hundred thousand 

 Frencli soldiers, whose bones strewed the plains of Russia from 

 Moscow to the Niemen provide the answer. Read in the history 

 of a more recent period how a British army was destroyed by cold 

 and privation, in the trenches before Sebastopol, while transports 

 rocked idly in the harbor of Balaclava, almost within sight of the 

 starved men dying like flies for want of the comforts they contained. 

 Consult English papers for the condition of the hospitals at Plevna, 

 when the Russians entered the town and found the wounded with 

 broken and unset limbs twisted out of all human recognition. In 

 records such as these you will read the true history of war. No 

 one accjuainted with them can deny that much remains to be done 

 to correct popular ideas and sentiments on the subject. There 

 must be a great change in the ordinary modes of thinking and 

 speaking of war before current opinion in regard to it conforms to 

 the standard of Christianity." 



It is not death alone that makes war terrible. Worse than dead 

 are the wrecks of men, maimed in body and shattered in mind, 

 who live afterward, a curse to themselves and a burden to their 

 friends. No account has yet been taken of the suffering at home. 

 Think of the three hundred and fifty thousand deatl in our last war on 

 the Northern side alone and then think of the' tliousands of mothers 

 left childless, tlie thousands of wives left husbandless, the thou- 

 sands of children left fatherless, the heart-burnings and heart-break- 

 ings it caused, and tlioi talk lightly and wantonh' of war. 



