THE CURSE OF PEACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 9871, 13 July 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE CURSE OF PEACE.

[by colonps.]

We can hardly honestly close our eyes to the fact that the world is growing rotten for want of a general war.

Prom time to time the curtain is drawn aside, and we have a glimpse of tho secret recesses of social life, and in the corruption that is sapping the virility of humanity, we see that dank growth of unwholesomeness which times and again has been swept away in the world's history, by the whirlwind of war.

Thero is no conventional ficmenb more generally held, than thab peace is necessarily a blessing, and war a curse, and a religious sanction seems given to it in our prayers, "Give peace in our time, O, Lord."

It is easy enough bo conjure up a picbure of streams of blood, and mangled corpses, of desolate homes and terrified populations, and to pub beside it, a picbure of smiling plains and happy homesteads, and of a people passing away its hours under the restful shades of vines and fig trees. Nobody doubts which of the pictures is the more attractive in itself. Bub it is nob the part of wisdom to accept a thing by its surface showing, and to ignore the farreaching consequences that may be veiled from sight by a shining exterior. Peace, like sugarcandy, is pleasant to taste, bub a diet of sweets only is nob conducive to healthy living, and the consequences of long"continued peace have in every age been deleterious to the body politic, and nearly every time the world has been saved from rottenness by war. It was when Rome had ceased bo be a fighting power thab luxurious living sapped its strength and prepared the way for the decline and tall of what had been the greatest empire in the world; and the incursions of the barbarians from the north, the sweeping destructions— as those of Attila, recognised as the " Scourge of God"—were apparently the heaven-ap-pointed ways for renovating the condition of the world.

lb of course shocks the unreflecting religious sentiment when one eulogises war asa blessing. Bub Moses struck the keynote of providential dispensation when on the shores of the Bed Sea he sang, "The Lord is a man of war; the Lord is His name. "

It needs only a glance at tho subsequent story of the chosen people to see that war and war continually was the elected means for establishing the theocracy. It would hpve been possible, one might think, to have converted the Philistines, and to have brought Amalek by peaceful moans into conformity with the national system of political and religious order. But no ; ib was extirpation root and branch, and on the ruins was founded the reign of righteousness and peace. War being thus sanctified by the highest religious authority has ever since, as ib had before been, employed by the great Ruler of the Universe as His chosen method of renovating nations and advancing the growth of good on earth. Ib seems therefore flying in the face of Divine Providence to attempt to belittle the blessedness of war, or to inculcate as a religious duty that wo should discourage a healthful militant spirib in the people. It is sometimes said that war is cruel ; bub whab moro cruelty is there in the sweeping down of battalions on the field of battle, than there is in their equally sure removal by the . lingering process of disease? Both methods are subject to the sanction ot the great Governor of earth, and to His eye at least there can be no difference.

Take those two hundred and fifty thousand men so so, that fell in one of Attila's battles over fourteen hundred and fifty years ago, and what difference does ib make ? They would have all been dead in a natural way fourteen cenburies ago, and probably not one of their deaths would have been half so pleasant. Some sixty thousand soldiers or thereabout fell at Waterloo. Bub whab of that ? There would nob have been a dozen of them surviving a generation ago if Bonaparte had stayed in Elba. Some twenty thousand British soldiers were laid in graves about Sebastapol forty years gone by. Mostly every one of them would have been in a grave in England now if there never had been a war with Russia.

And what is the difference ? They had brighter, happier, quicker deaths, mosb of them, than if they had had to pass through the lingering agonies of typhoid or consumption, or starvation, may be, and viewed in perspective in this way, great battles and the more natural removal by disease seem pretty much on the same level. In the hands of the great Disposer of earthly things it is doubtless quite the same ; and His eye sees no difference between the swift flight of the bullet or the flash of the bayonet and the ghastly scythe of Death when His purposes of government are to bo served.

We, of course, viewing a battle close beside us, in our shortsighted way think it very dreadful. Bub that is just from the narrowness of our comprehension, for death on the battlefield is really no more los 3 bo the human race than death in a four-posb bedstead, and it is frequently a great deal nicer : for the man is borne up by a glorious sense of duty to his country, and by the fierce delight of conflict, till ping ! and all is over. But this is only speaking of the benefits of war ; let us think of all the evil that has come from the too long continuance of peace. Ib may be affirmed without fear of contraduction that the British race is ab this hour sodden with immorality as ib never was before. Let anyone look ab' the tone which current literature has taken, and recollect that the style is only catering to the market. In the mosb popular fiction the sexual question is everywhere treated in its loathsome forms. The sanctity of marriage and of the domestic relations is dealt with in the mosb contemptuous fashion, and theories are advanced unblushingly that sob at nought all the principles that have been recognised as regulating the relations of men and women. See in many of the most popular and respectable illustrated magazines the continual presentation of nature in a stabe of nudity, such as was bub rarely if ever seen in other days. It is all done for the sake of arb, we are told the erstwhile high priest of which was Oscar Wilde. Bub everyone knows that the truth of it is that ib is nob to meet tho aesthetic taste of the few that look wibh pure artistic feeling on the representation of the beautiful forms of nature's handiwork, bub on business principles, for bhe who gloab over the picture in tho gratification of •their own prurient passions. See tbe universal spread in all large cities of the exhibition of tableaux vivants, with scant drapery —and that diaphanousor none at all, as in the United States wibh simple bronzing, in cynical deference to the claims of propriety. See among the leisured luxurious 'classes of England the prevalence, as yet in part concealed, of Oscar- Wildeism imported from the fallen and degraded East, which was utterly unknown to England in the day of its manly vigour. Or look again ab the dominant spirit in the chief activities of the day. Nobler ib is by comparison wibh the pleasures of the idle and luxurious, bub its highesb inspiration is the desire to get wealth to provide more of the luxuries of life. Ib is sordid in its objects &t the best; bub with the vast majority ib is bhe motive influence in the greab advances of the century, of which we boaeb so much. For ib thousands and tens of thousands descend bo bricks of cunning and cheating, little, if anything, different from the crimes to which the law attaches penalties. And how different ib is from the chivalry of the days when men had to look bo their arms to defend themselves and those dearest to them, from imminent danger. Then the sentiment of " duke et decorum est pro patria mori " lifted men above themselves, and gave them that spirit of selfsacrifice that imparted the nobiliby of character which made England great. Now the sentiment is that everybody should look out for his own miserable akin. It is exactly as ib was in the period of the declining greatness of Rome, when the PS9PIa ceased to have the nuutfal.sfiirfy

stirred within them, and when, under the corrupting influence of peace, they gave themselves to idleness and self-indulgence and vice. - ' But ib may be-said that religion should supply the place which war once did in lifting the people above themselves and forming a higher ideal of life. It should. But has ib done so ? Surely nob. There never was a time in which refigion had a freer hand for elevating the masses of v the people, and yet it seems to touch but the hem of our social life.

Ib is nob to be denied thab there are thousands and tens of thousands of men actuated by the highest principles of religion, jusb as thero are thousands and tens of thousands of men who are not religious, who live lives of usefulness and dignity. Bub, around them is the greab sweltering mass of humanity, on which their influence is nil, and despite their feeble piping, society is, as revelations from time to time show it to be, to-day, with a thin veneer— and that in places only—covering a seething mass of rottenness. Let bub a greab war break out; let danger threaten hearths and homes; leb the people be moved as they would be, throughout every class, with an ennobling impulse of self-sacrifice, to fight for what was dear to them, and with martial music ringing in their ears, with hand on sword, and calling on the God of Battles to befriend them, they would develop a fervour of noble chivalry thab would save them yet from the debilitating and degrading influence of a too long continued peace.