WAR AND CIVILIZATION. 761 



development of humanitarian feeling have within the last fifty 

 years very greatly increased the difficulties in the way of war, 

 and powerfully inclined nations to regulate their relations with 

 one another on principles of equity. Where is this process to 

 stop ? There is evidently a radical contradiction between the 

 appeal to reason and the appeal to force; and if the habit of 

 appealing to reason is gaining strength day by day, can we be- 

 lieve that the nations will go on indefinitely making prepara- 

 tions on the most enormous scale for the other mode of arbitra- 

 ment ? " One thing is clear," says De Quincey, " that when all the 

 causes of war involving manifest injustice are banished by the 

 force of opinion focally converged upon the subject the range of 

 war will be prodigiously circumscribed." It is a great satisfac- 

 tion to know that things are most distinctly moving in this di- 

 rection. As a much more recent author, M. Ernest Lavisse, in 

 his admirable little book, entitled A General View of the Polit- 

 ical History of Europe, observes: "The ambition of territorial 

 aggrandizement is tempered by a certain modesty. At the pres- 

 ent day no sovereign would dare to undertake annexations on 

 pretexts such as Louis XIV gave before attacking Spain in 1667, 

 or Frederick II in 1740 after invading Silesia. If Poland's exist- 

 ence, miserable as it was, had been prolonged a few decades, her 

 destruction would perhaps have been impossible." 



That wars have directly or indirectly resulted in some advan- 

 tage to the world in past times, it would be vain to deny ; and 

 that their role of usefulness even between so-called civilized 

 nations is wholly and forever at an end, it would not be safe to 

 assert. This, however, may be said, that if war ensues between 

 two such nations, it is owing not to their civilization in any true 

 sense, but to some lack in the civilization of one or other or both 

 some predominance of the spirit of greed, some inaccessibility 

 to the dictates of reason, some fault of domestic government by 

 which the crude passions and ignorant prejudices of the multi- 

 tude or possibly the interested and partial views of a governing 

 class, are allowed undue sway, some national overweeningness, 

 some aberration of public opinion. War in such a case teaches 

 sharp and much-needed lessons; but, unfortunately, it does not 

 invariably advance the cause of justice. It shows where power 

 resides, but does not always indicate the right. It may chasten 

 where chastening was less needed, and exalt the pride of those 

 who already were too insolent. Whatever evil it may destroy, it 

 leaves new-created evil in its path. All we can hope is that, upon 

 the whole, the education of the world may be advanced by the 

 dire experience. We need not, however, laud war on this account, 

 any more than we laud the epidemic which, taking its origin in 

 neglect of sanitary principles, attacks by preference the weakly 



VOL. XLVIII. 55 



