THE ART OF KILLING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3587, 10 January 1883, Page 4

THE ART OF KILLING.

The Spectator has some cheerful speculations on possible improvements in the art of killing. At present, notwithstanding the help that science has given to butchery in war, we are really not much in advance of our ancestors in the \ ear of One. They carried on Avar by throwing stones and banging each other with dubs. .Substantially we do the same. Our .stones our bigger and we throw them further, but that is all. At present we can throw a big stone—namely, a 170011.) shell, which will burst where it alights, and kill (.-very living thing within a circuit of a hundred feet —we can such a stone a distance of three miles. The only improvement, that science encourages us to hope for is that we may learn to throw bigger stones still, and throw them further. Possibly we may even become able to drop them from balloons—which would be miirhry inconvenient to anyone who happened'to go below. When ballooning is perfected, battles will be fought either in the air or underground; nobody will be able to live on the" surface. Still, balloon warfare will mainly resolve itself into stonethrowing. Some philanthropists hold that until we have arrived at a more scientific, expeditious, and comprehensive mode of killing than this, there is no real hope for the progress of the race. Suppose an asphyxiating vapour were available which would smother a whole army at once. The late Captain Warner believed himself to have invented such a, vapour (perhaps this also was Lord Dundonald's secret), and tried it with entire success upon a flock of sheep. But it is the peculiarity of such vapours that they rise. The army to be suffocated would escape by merely lying down. The sheep did not know this fact, and consequently perished. There is no way at present known of smothering a body of men in the open air unless they can be persuaded to stand erect during the process. Abandoning - hope from that quarter, there remains to us the possibilities of electricity. We may learn to shoot lightning at each other—which ought to he more effective than stonethrowing : or, again, we might contrive to arrange mirror-, "so as to concentrate intolerable heat, heat that would pulverise a diamond at a considerable distance." "The thing could be done," says the Spectator, "so effectually that the very i\b« of an iron ship would dissolve into molten metal—but not at any distance." That is the discouraging fact.' We ought to be able to do it from so great a distance that the iron si rip to be operated upon would not find it possible to derange our apparatus by throwing 1700 pound shells at it. On the whole there is no immediate prospect of any improvement in our methods of wholesale killing, which seems much to be regretted. The era of universal peace cannot arrive, say .senile theorists, until war i.s made so deadly that it will be worth nobody's while to fight. On that view the outlook is gloomy, and one would fain hope that there may lie a "more excellent way." What is the good of having- so many religions if they can't keep mankind from rending and tearing , each other like brute beasts ':.