ic praise of battle, I have
overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who
have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two
essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of
'Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there
simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. And all, there urged,
is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that
most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to
take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by
the labour of others,--to move them and provide them with destructive
machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of
future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and
if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of
thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged
shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures countlessly beyond all
help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into
clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your
work;--What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?

That, I say, is _modern_ war,--scientific war,--chemical and mechanic
war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell
me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be
so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered
than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our
enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet
hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days;--what war
might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join
the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a
book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to
know--Muller's 'Dorians;'--but I have put the points I wish you to
remember in closer connection than in his text.

'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure
and subdued strength; the violence [Greek: lyssa] of Aristodemus and
Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise; and
these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from the northern
Barbarians, whose boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the
same re