In discussing the question of
peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the
murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree
that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious
transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put
rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts,
in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the
greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few
years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and
showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read
with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the
nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment
and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour
does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read
of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for
Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors
to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands
of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and
children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the
superfluous brutalities of war.
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