Who shall speak of the awful monotony of the hospital camps, where men die like flies, and where regret, sympathy, kindness are blotted from the hardened soldier’s breast?  People are not cruel by nature, but the vague picturesque language of historians and other general writers prevents men and women from forming just opinions.  I believe that, if one hundred wounded men could be transported from a battle-field and laid down in the public square of any town or city for the population to see, then the gazers would say among themselves, “So this is war, is it?  Well, for our parts, we shall be very cautious before we raise any agitation that might force our Government into any conflict.  We can die if our liberties are threatened, for there are circumstances in which it would be shameful to live, but we shall never do anything which may bring about results such as those before us.”  That would be a fair and temperate mode of talking—­far different from the airy babble of the warlike scribe.

An argumentative person may stop us here and ask, “Are you of opinion that it is possible to abolish warfare?” Unfortunately, we can cherish no such pleasing hope.  I do emphatically believe that in time men will come to see the wild folly of engaging in sanguinary struggles; but the growth of their wisdom will be slow.  Action and reaction are equal; the fighting instinct has been impressed on our nature by hereditary transmission for countless generations, and we cannot hope suddenly to make man a peaceful animal any more than we can hope to breed setters from South African wild dogs.  But the conditions of life are gradually changing, and the very madness which has made Europe into a huge barrack may work its own cure.  The burden will probably grow so intolerable that the most embruted of citizens will ask themselves why they bear it, and a rapid revolution may undo the growth of centuries.  The scientific men point to the huge warfare that goes on from the summit of the Himalayas to the depths of the ocean slime, and they ask how men can be exempt from the universal struggle for existence.  But it is by no means certain that the pressure of population in the case of man will always force on struggles—­at any rate, struggles that can be decided only by death and agony.  Little by little we are learning something of the laws that govern our hitherto mysterious existence, and we have good hopes that by and by our race may learn to be mutually helpful, so that our span of life may be passed with as much happiness as possible.  Men will strive against each other, but the striving will not be carried on to an accompaniment of slaughter and torture.  There are keen forms of competition which, so far from being painful, give positive pleasure to those who engage in them; there are triumphs which satisfy the victor without mortifying the vanquished; and, in spite of the indiscreet writers who have called forth this Essay, I hold that such harmless forms