260 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



Emperors strutting about like peacocks, their heads 

 decorated with feathers, showing their parts in their 

 reviews of creatures raised, trained, and forced to a 

 business which has the sole object of killing, torturing, 

 and starving their fellow- creatures ! War is a game 

 which at the best is a game of hazard . Oh, war ! cruel 

 war ! which produces misery, pain, and vice of every 

 description ; which devastates the frugality of the 

 peasant ; which ruins industry ; which turns the 

 happiness of peace into a hideous hell. 1 How long 



constantly depict in their narrations the cowardice, disloyalty, and 

 hypocrisy of this European society ? 



" A society which permits human beings to die of starvation on the 

 steps of houses filled with victuals ; a society whose force is directed 

 to oppress the weak by the strong, has no right to complain that the 

 natural sciences subvert the foundations of its morality. 



" Yes, those who know how to appreciate the ideas we defend, and 

 which are so vehemently attacked by the whole clique of pharisees r 

 hypocrites, mystics, Jesuits, and pietists, may be able to imagine that 

 at some future period there may be a more ideal social edifice, which 

 will have for its foundations human dignity and human equality. "- 

 (" Force and Matter," Dr. Louis Biichner, 1864, p. 249.) 



1 " The report in the Times of the battle of Sedan has the follow- 

 ing : ' Let your readers fancy masses of coloured rags glued together 

 with blood and brains, and pinned into strange shapes by fragments 

 of bones. Let them conceive men's bodies without heads, legs with- 

 out bodies, heaps of human entrails attached to red and blue cloth, 

 and disembowelled corpses in uniform, bodies lying about in all atti- 

 tudes, and skulls shattered, faces blown off, hips smashed, bones, 

 flesh, and gay clothing all pounded together as if brayed in a mortar, 

 extending for miles, not very thick in any one place, but recurring 

 perpetually for weary hours ; and then they cannot, with the most 

 vivid imagination, come up to the sickening reality of that 

 butchery.' 



" Inconceivably horrible as were the battle-fields, they w T ere not the 

 only, probably not the worst, of the horrors of war. For one killed 

 in battle, ten or more were killed by slow torture, by wounds, disease, 



