nd care of it, his
fruit-trees, hedgerows, and pleasant dwellings, blown-away with
gunpowder; and the kind seedfield lies a desolate, hideous Place of
Sculls.--Nevertheless, Nature is at work; neither shall these
Powder-Devilkins with their utmost devilry gainsay her: but all that
gore and carnage will be shrouded-in, absorbed into manure; and next
year the Marchfeld will be green, nay greener. Thrifty unwearied
Nature, ever out of our great waste educing some little profit of thy
own,--how dost thou, from the very carcass of the Killer, bring Life
for the Living!

'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and
upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil,
in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five-hundred souls.
From these, by certain "Natural Enemies" of the French, there are
successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied
men: Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she
has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and
even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build,
another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone
avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are
selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges,
some two-thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed
there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain,
are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like
manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties
come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty,
each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word "Fire!" is given:
and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty
brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it
must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as
the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the
entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even,
unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How
then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and, instead of
shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads
shoot.--Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other
lands; still as of old, "what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must
pay the piper!"--In that fiction of the English Sm