POLITICAL RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 665 



will be produced under the stress of industrial competition in 

 free communities. Nor is it otherwise with great public 

 works and developed industrial arts. Though, in the canal 

 cut by the Persians across the isthmus of Athos, and again 

 in a canal of two miles long made by the Fijians, we see 

 botb that war is the first prompter to such undertakings and 

 that the despotic rule established by it is the needful agency 

 for carrying them out; yet we also see that industrial evolu 

 tion has now reached a stage at which commercial advantage 

 supplies a sufficient stimulus, and private trading corporations 

 a sufficient power, to execute works far larger and more 

 numerous. And though from early days when flint arrow 

 heads were chipped and clubs carved, down to present days 

 when armour-plates a foot thick are rolled, the needs of 

 defence and offence have urged on invention and mechanical 

 skill ; yet in our own generation steam-hammers, hydraulic 

 rams, and multitudinous new appliances from locomotives to 

 telephones, prove that industrial needs alone have come to 

 furnish abundant pressure whereby, hereafter, the industrial 

 arts will be further advanced. Thus, that social evolution 

 which had to be achieved through the conflicts of societies 

 with one another, has already been achieved ; and no further 

 benefits are to be looked for. 



Only further evils are to be looked for from the conti 

 nuance of militancy in civilized nations. The general lesson 

 taught by all the foregoing chapters is that, indispensable as 

 has been this process by which nations have been conso 

 lidated, organized, and disciplined, and requisite as has been 

 the implied coercion to develop certain traits of individual 

 human nature, yet that, beyond the unimaginable amount of 

 suffering directly involved by the process, there has been an 

 unimaginable amount of suffering indirectly involved ; alike 

 by the forms of political institutions necessitated, and by the 

 accompanying type of individual nature fostered. And they 

 show by implication that for the dimiDiition of this suffering, 

 not only of the direct kind but of the indirect kind, the one 



