THE WASTES OF MODERN' CIVILIZATION. 517 



defense of their oppressors ; and the conscious impossibility of 

 relying on the enthusiasm of volunteers obliges every ruler of 

 fifty faithful square miles to surround his throne with a bulwark 

 of dehumanized machine soldiers, who, in obedience to the man- 

 date of the uniformed chief machinist, would shoot their own 

 fathers or bayonet their own children. A territory which once 

 could be easily managed with twenty legions, each of four thou- 

 sand men, has now to be bullied into submission by standing 

 armies aggregating from five million and a half to six million 

 conscripts. The expenses of maintaining that apparatus for the 

 perpetuation of orthodox despotism cost the nations of Europe a 

 minimum of $625,000,000 a year, and withdraw from agriculture 

 an amount of labor which otherwise would suffice to support her 

 population in spite of intermittent droughts. 



Our elaborate code of by-laws for the suppression of holiday 

 recreations can still be circumvented by the resources of opulence, 

 and the well-known hopelessness of any other expedient has stim- 

 ulated a race for wealth which does not hesitate to attain its ob- 

 ject at any risk of social or sanitary consequences. The number 

 of infants which the superstition of the Ammonites sacrificed to 

 Moloch is a mere trifle compared with the multitude of children 

 now devoted to a far more cruel fate by being literally drudged 

 to death in crowded factories to enable a millionaire to save a few 

 dimes on his weekly pay-roll and add a few per cent to the exor- 

 bitant rate of his yearly profits. In times of general scarcity the 

 market has been drained of its scant supplies by speculators try- 

 ing to coin gain from the distress of their fellow-men and risking, 

 after all, to be foiled by the decay of their hoarded stores or their 

 destruction by fire or flood. Quack nostrums, which not one in- 

 telligent man in a hundred would privately hesitate to pronounce 

 infinitely worse than worthless, are sold by ship-loads and car- 

 loads to disseminate disease and the seeds of the stimulant- vice, 

 and the saints who contribute thousands to insure the theological 

 soundness of the Quaggalla Hottentots do not care enough for 

 the physical health of their own countrymen to whisper a word 

 against the lawfulness of the infamous traffic. 



Nearly two thousand years ago Pliny and Columella denounced 

 the folly of destroying the highland forests that shelter the sources 

 of fertilizing brooks and the nests of insect-destroying birds. " Sa- 

 cred groves " were not limited to the land of the Phoenicians. The 

 Celtic and German Druids protected the forests of their native 

 lands ; and even the barbarous Huns seem dimly to have recog- 

 nized the climatic influence of arboreal vegetation, since we read 

 of their chiefs enacting laws for the protection of the mountain- 

 woods in the lower valley of the Danube. 



The mediaeval reign of Antinaturalism, however, inaugurated 



