406 DIKES OF THE NETHERLANDS. 
this is so, it is one of the most interesting among the many in- 
stances in which the arts and enginery of war have been so 
modified as to be eminently promotive of the blessings of peace, 
thereby in some measure compensating the wrongs and suffer- 
ings they have inflicted on humanity.* The Lowlanders are 
mans. Ihave found no ancient authority in support of this assertion, nor 
can I refer to any passage in Roman literature in which sea-dikes are express- 
ly mentioned otherwise than as walls or piers, except that in Pliny (Hist. Vat., 
xxxvi. 24), where it is said that the Tyrrhenian Sea was excluded from the 
Lucrine Lake by dikes. Dugdale, whose enthusiasm for his subject led him to 
believe that recovering from the sea land subject to be flooded by it, was of 
divine appointment, because God said: ‘‘ Let the waters under the heaven 
be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear,” unhesita- 
tingly ascribes the reclamation of the Lincolnshire fens to the Romans, though 
he is able to cite but one authority, a passage in Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, 
which certainly has no such meaning, in support of the assertion.—/History of 
Limbankment and Drainage, 2d edition, 1772. 
* It is worth mentioning, as an illustration of the applicability of military 
instrumentalities to pacific art, that the sale of gunpowder in the United 
States was smaller during the late rebellion than before, because the war 
caused the suspension of many public and private improvements, in the exe- 
cution of which great quantities of powder were used for blasting. 
The same observation was made in France during the Crimean war, and it 
is alleged that, in general, not ten per cent. of the powder manufactured on 
either side of the Atlantic is employed for military purposes. 
The blasting for the Mount Cenis tunnel consumed gunpowder enough to fill 
more than 200,000,000 musket cartridges. 
It is a fact not creditable to the moral sense of modern civilization, that 
very many of the most important improvements in machinery and the work- 
ing of metals have originated in the necessities of war, and that man’s highest 
ingenuity has been shown, and many of his most remarkable triumphs over 
natural forces achieved, in the contrivance of engines for the destruction of his 
fellow-man. The military material employed by the first Napoleon has be- 
come, in less than two generations, nearly as obsolete as the sling and stone of 
the shepherd, and attack and defence now begin at distances to which, half a 
century ago, military reconnoissances hardly extended. Upon a partial view 
of the subject, the human race seems destined to become its own execu- 
tioner—on the one hand, exhausting the capacity of the earth to furnish sus- 
tenance to her taskmaster ; on the other, compensating diminished production 
by inventing more efficient methods of exterminating the consumer. At the 
present moment, at an epoch of universal peace, the whole civilized world, 
with the happy exception of our own country, is devoting its utmost ener- 
