t as
cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
contemporaries. The long experience of internal peace since the War
of the Roses had not been without its effect; and while the Tudor and
Stuart periods had atrocities enough, we need only remember what was
going on at the same time in France and Germany in order to realize how
much worse it might have been. In England, as elsewhere, however, it
was, when looked at with our eyes, a rough and brutal time. It was a day
of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were
maimed and bruised and great offenders cut into pieces by sentence of
court. The pioneers of New England had grown up familiar with such
things; and among the townspeople of Boston and Hartford in 1675 were
still many who in youth had listened to the awful news from Magdeburg or
turned pale over the horrors in Piedmont upon which Milton invoked the
wrath of Heaven. [Sidenote: Growth of humane sentiment in recent times]

When civilized men are removed from the safeguards of civilization and
placed in the wilderness amid the hideous dangers that beset human
existence in a savage state of society, whatever barbarism lies latent
in them is likely to find many opportunities for showing itself.
The feelings that stir the meekest of men, as he stands among the
smoulderin