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54 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
a place of worship consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace ; I will support in every pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer the chime on another round the world's wide circumference, and the voice of prayer and the song of praise should ascend like a universal offering to heaven."
IF According to reliable calculations, in less than three hundred years there has been spent in the game of human slaughter £1,500,000,000, drawn in taxes from the hard earnings of the workers of the coiintry. The world's wars during the nineteenth century amounted to nearly £4,000,000,000. About 16s. in every £1 raised in taxes has to be paid for existing armaments, and for interest on the National Debt, £788,000,000, incurred mainly by previous wars. All the European States are groaning under the taxation required to maintain their armaments. Some of them are almost crushed by a debt which borders on bankruptcy. The wealth, the strength, the skill which should be devoted to schools, orphanages, hospitals, the better housing of the poor, and old age pensions, are year by year more and more absorbed by the most gigantic preparations for warfare which the world has ever seen.^
Take some few points connected with the war in South Africa, remembering that the losses on the Boer side were at least equal to the British : killed in action, 2657 ; died of wounds in South Africa, 670; died of disease, 4337— total deaths, 7810; total wounded, 12,209 ; invalids sent home, 19,277. Add to these the death of some 400,000 horses and mules, together with a debt of £250,000,000 ; besides £20,000,000 a year ever since the war in increased taxation.
Take next the awful slaughter of Russians and Japanese in the Eusso-Japanese war, which is unparalleled in the history of the world. Of the Japanese there were killed and wounded, 218,429, besides of their sick, 221.326 ; total, 439,755 sufferers. Add to these the Russian losses, and the number will be nearly a million wrecked and injured men in this one war. Arbitration would have prevented this awful catastrophe.
Or take the Crimean War, which started from a trifling quarrel over the protection of holy places in Palestine, and was developed by Napoleon in. mainly for the selfish purpose of establishing his own dynasty by means of a great European war. That war cost the Western Powers 428,000 men, and the Russians 325,000. It cost England, moreover, £69,000,000 directly, and £63,000,000 indirectly. The whole of that war was sheer and useless waste of life and money, and no satisfactory object was gained.
1 D. S. Govett.
ISAIAH 55
IF " My heart is broken," wrote Wellington on the morrow of Waterloo, " by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions, and my poor soldiers. Believe me," he said, " nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won."
IF Vereschagin, the greatest military painter of the nineteenth century, has expressed himself upon the subject of war in these terms : " I am not a military painter at all. I paint war scenes because they are very interesting. War is the loss of all human sense; under its influence men become animals entirely. The artist looks always for passion, and passion is seen at its height on the battlefield. This is why war attracts me, as it must always attract artists and authors too. Every hour brings something new, something never seen before, something outside the range of ordinary human life ; it is the reversal of Christianiti/, and for the artist, the author, and the philosopher it must always have a supreme interest. But what a foolish game it is ! Here, men are being shot down like cattle ; there, sisters of mercy are picking them up and trying to heal their wounds. A man no sooner falls than he is taken into the hospital, where men with broken limbs lie in hundreds or thousands ; and while gentle women are ten- derly caring for them, assuaging their agony, and lessening, as much as they can, their almost unbearable pain, men are falling like rain not far away. What nonsense. How stupid to wound a man to heal his wound again. The savages are the only logical warriors I know. They kill their enemies and eat them."
2. £ecat(se it is so cruel.
How incredibly brutal it all is ! The passionate fury of the fight, how terrible its power ! How it lays hold of us ! Who dares, in cold blood, to bring before his imagination the horror of the battle-scene ? No one can believe it as he really tries to think it out. The pictures of the illustrated papers in war-time, the brilliant descriptions of correspondents, these turn us sick at the first look ; and then we get used to them — get used to them just because we cannot present such hideous cruelties to our imagination in real flesh and blood. As we read the wearisome repetitions of wounds and death, it becomes to us like some bad dream, some nightmare — it cannot be really happening. We do not believe it. I shall never forget how this incredibility of it all came upon me once, when I passed out of the door of a panorama of the battle of Worth, at Cologne — a panorama where everything was given, in terrific vigour, that could sicken and