everywhere.
Now, however, looking back on all the events of that terrible struggle
and duly weighing the surroundings and impelling forces leading up to
it, allowing also for all temporary excuses and pretexts, and admitting
all that can be said for partisanship on either side, there can be no
use in blinking at the pregnant fact that the real cause of the war
arose from a desire to settle whether the French or the Germans were the
strongest in sheer brute force--just in the same way as two men, or
boys, fight with nature's weapons in a pugilistic encounter to strive
for the mastery, thus indulging in passions which they share with the
beasts of the field!

The long, steady, complete preparation for war on each side shows that
this very simple and intelligible motive was at the bottom of it all;
and it is pitiable to think, for the sake of human nature, when
recapitulating the history of this fearful conflict of fifteen years ago
which caused such misery and murderous loss of life, that two of the
most polished, advanced, educated, and representative nations of Europe
at that time should not have apparently attained a higher code of
civilised morality than that adopted by the natives of Dahomey--one,
ruled over by the blood-stained fetish of human sacrifice! As the world
advances, looking at the matter in this light, we seem to have exchanged
one sort of barbarism for another, and the present one appears almost
the worse of the two, by the very reason of its being mixed up with so
much scientific advancement, cultural refinement, and the higher
development of man. It is like the old devil returning and bringing
with him seven other devils more powerful for evil than their original
prototype, this prostitution of learning, intellect, and philosophy to
the most debasing influences of human nature!

These thoughts, however, did not affect either Fritz or his mother at
the time.

Not being the only son of a widow, in which case he might have been
exempted from service, Fritz, when he had reached his eighteenth year,
had been compelled to join the ranks of the national army; and, after
completing the ordinary course of drill, had been relegated to the
Landwehr and allowed to return home to his civic occupation. But, when
the order was promulgated throughout the German empire to mobilise the
vast human man-slaying machine which General Moltke and Prince Bismark
had constructed with such painstaking care that units could