Themistocles, or Alcibiades and Xenophon? While Sparta and Athens opposed each other singly, trading Athens was the conqueror; and Sparta only subdued her by committing the Hellenic treachery of calling in the aid of the fleets and wealth of Persia. There is a difference between thinking much of fighting and being good fighters,-between aggressive and warlike.

The Chinese are by habits and education not fond of fighting; but when Sir James Brooke made one of his expeditions against certain tribes in the interior of Borneo, it is observed that a body of Chinese auxiliaries were always ready to support him and his Europeans in his moves, while his fierce, head hunting allies frequently hung back. There is now being raised an outcry against the debasing effects of peace; but, in the name of common sense, will any forty years of war enable us to place in the field thirty thousand men, stronger in body and braver in spirit than forty years of peace enabled us to march to the foot of the Alma heights?

It has recently been maintained, as an absolute principle in human affairs, that war, or the physical fighting of human beings with each other, is necessary to progress; and that, therefore, the nation which ceases to conquer necessarily begins to decay.* It is important at present that this fallacy should not obtain currency; for it is one essentially discivilizing. Without war, it is maintained, man's energies dwindle and disappear. It is forgotten that we can war with inanimate nature as well as with the animate; and that in the first kind of war the energies necessary to progress can be even more completely nourished than in the second. It is this, not less than the wealth produced by their conflicts

* Cousin, the celebrated French metaphysical writer, who has by the aid of an eloquent style powerfully illustrated many great truths, and done much to promote mental cultivation, goes widely astray on this subject. He has shouted with the largest party in martially inclined France, and, in a necessarily obscure and vague, because sophistical manner, has attempted to prove that war is good in itself, is essentially necessary to the progress of humanity and must always exist. In his "Cours de Philosophie, Deuxième Série," the ninth and tenth chapters of volume first are direct contributions to barbarism.

with inanimate nature on land and sea, that has, in all ages, enabled industrial and commercial communities, large and small, to fight with so much success ;-which enabled mercantile Venice and Genoa to cope with the warring Turks; the free towns of Germany and Belgium, communities holding circumscribed territory, to cope with the fighting barons and princes, rulers of wide domains; the industrial Hollanders, with the military Spaniards; the parliamentary train bands of London, with the Royalist cavaliers; and the trading Chinaman with the savage Malay of the Indian Archipelago.

I have spoken of the instruments and methods of the civilized process. One of the most effective of these methods is that sustained mental and physical exertion in the pursuit of any object denoted by the word Perseverance. It is a marked feature of societies that have been, by common consent, called civilized. Savages are, indeed, found to manifest this quality in a considerable degree but only in a few directions, and these unnecessary to more advanced communities; for instance, in hunting-in watching for and pursuing their prey. But hunting is one of the first shapes of the struggle of man with the world around him. In all other respects, savages are "fan fuh puh ting" as the Chinese call them-"hither and thither not fixed." They are unstable and unpersevering. As population increases, increasing tribes begin to dispute about the means of sustenance, as hunting grounds, &c.; man begins to struggle with man; and perseverance is nourished in war. If a nation, which has flourished in consequence of its wars and conquests, ceases from some cause to make war, without nourishing perseverance in industrial or commercial avocations, it proves, after a period of really slothful peace, to be wanting in a civilized method important for success; and then falls a prey to other peoples. We have here one of the causes of Roman decay. England in the whole course of her history never possessed more of the elements of success in war than she does at this time, after

forty years' assiduous devotion to trading and agricultural pursuits. And she, with her good ally France, will "persevere," both at Sebastopol and Sweaborg, till both are taken.*

Lying in a trading bargain is debasing and discivilizing, just as lying in a political speech, or lying in a military despatch is debasing and discivilizing; but trade, in itself, is no more debasing than politics or war.

War is the name of the struggle of larger communities of men with each other by means of physical agencies; in civil war, the contending bodies being severally constituted "communities" by some interests and opinions common to the members in each body. Wars for the mere purpose of extending territorial limits are eminently barbarous in their origin, being a voluntary breach of the civilizing rule that requires the greatest possible use of the moral agencies only. Self-defence is the only civilized basis of war; and that war is most civilized in its origin which is not resorted to, till the moral and intellectual agencies have been employed to the utmost in the struggle with the aggressive nation. Among the more advanced nations, the division of labour has produced a special organism to perform this function of the social body: the diplomatic service and, in so far as it operates between its own countrymen and the nation where it is placed, the consular. These two departments may be called the International Service of a state; and, other things alike, that nation is most civilized, whose International Service is kept most efficient.

Among the more savage peoples the germ even of an International Service does not exist. The persons of simple

* This was in type five months ago. What has passed during that time strengthens the text. Though we did not shine in the taking of Sebastopol, and though there has been no fighting since to prove greater efficiency on our part, it is now notorious that the mere, but most unmistakeable determination of the British people to persevere, has altered the tone of continental nations about us. They have at length discovered that after all "England is a very formidable power." Figs is ready-would rather like to go in for the fourth time, and make play with his left.

messengers between the hostile tribes would not be safe; none are therefore sent; and a state of absolute hostility exists from generation to generation, till one tribe is exterminated, or till the progress of both in civilization makes some little negotiation possible. Among semi-barbarous peoples, the mental agencies are frequently employed; but are nevertheless not invariably tried, before it is known that physical agencies are the only efficient ones under the circumstances. Such peoples merely send envoys on special missions; while the more civilized nations have their functionaries, the members of the international service,-always on the scene where their labours come into operation.

In this matter, China, which sends no envoys to the West and sends them but rarely to the semi-barbarous peoples in its vicinity, stands low; while Russia is placed very high by the admittedly great ability of her international agents.

From all that the public has learnt of the international communications previous to, and for some time after, the commencement of the war, it appears certain that Turkey, England, and France did the utmost their diplomatic officials were able to do with mental agencies, in order to avert a physical conflict with Russia. Further, every man moderately acquainted with ancient and modern history, and with the present political geography of the Old World, and whose understanding is unwarped, must perceive that the existence of England and France was mediately threatened by Russian territorial aggression and progress. Hence their war with Russia is essentially civilized in its origin, because mediately self-defensive and only resorted to after earnest negotiative efforts to prevent it.

Let us now consider the conduct of wars, and what it is exactly that should be called civilized, what barbarous warfare.

Civilization being the introduction of efficient mental agencies to the reduction of the physical, and the object of war, when once begun, being to overcome the inimical nation

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by the destruction of the greatest possible number of its fighting men; it follows that the invention of destructive. engines of war, is essentially civilizing to war, and that the more destructive they prove, the more civilizing must they be. This conclusion appears, at first sight, extremely paradoxical; so horrible and thoroughly barbarous does the infliction of sudden and disfiguring death on numbers of human beings seem. But the testimony of historical experience, as to the practical result, fully confirms the conclusion from the theory; that result being, that, with the same number of combatants, the more destructive the engines of death, the less the ultimate total destruction of life. The merely physical death-struggle with a number of individual specimens of animate nature, is on the one hand transformed into an active industrial struggle with inanimate nature in the manufacture of the instruments of destruction in which the contending nations labour to surpass each other; and on the other hand it is directly intellectualized by the discovery and conscious employment of methods of strategy.

When a general marks, in his enemy, a great superiority in artillery and in the strategical position taken up, he seeks to withdraw his troops from a hopeless contest. Where there are no such signs to judge by, the two armies can only engage in a murderous butchery, hand to hand, with cold steel; which species of struggle must be prolonged to the extent of enormous slaughter before a conquering superiority can possibly become manifest. And what holds of the generals at the head of armies, holds of the governments at the head of nations. When they plainly perceive themselves to be outstripped in the intellectual invention and industrial accumulation of the instruments of destruction; in the intellectual use (by good generals) of these instruments and of the soldiers; as also in the moral cultivation of the soldiers and mental power of the generals to work advantageously on the spirit of their troops by moral agencies; then they seek to end the struggle by a peace.