The Condition of Europe.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 860, 24 August 1888, Page 10

The Condition of Europe.

The Pall Mall Gazette is publishing a series of articles from its special correspondent upon 4 War or Peace. 5 They are graphi. cally and powerfully written, and we reproduce, below, sections of them under the original headings : THE VAMPIRE AT THE BEDSIDE.

Before discussing what are the immediate prospects of peace or war in Europe, it is well to ask ourselves what is this Peace which exists, what this War which men fear ? Both are new phenomena in the world’s history. We have a peace which is like no peace that has before existed. We stand face to face with a possible war like to none that in our time has ever desolated the world. It is worth while to look for a moment at these phenomena. First, then, as to the peace. Peace implies rest, and in Europe there is no rest. Peace supposes security and confidence, but in Europe everywhere is insecurity and suspicion. Peace supposes order, but in Europe there is not order, but international anarchy. The Coutinent is an armed camp. The nations labour, as the Jews rebuilt Jerusalem, with a sword in one hand and their industrial tools in the other. Restless, suspicious armies are encamped side by side where formerly nations lived and laboured. Every year some one or other of these armies invents some more deadly weapon than its rival, some more terrific explosive, some more expeditious mode of slaughter. No sooner does this happen than all the others hasten to adopt it, piling on with desperate energy the panoply of armour beneath which humanity is being crushed. Amid thejceaseless ebb and flow of human affairs, one phenomenon never varies. The sum total expended on making ready for slaughter constantly increases. Every year more and more is drained from the soil in order to feed the magazines. Every year the barrack gains on tho cottage, and preparation fox war becomes the absorbing preocoupation of a great proportion of the flower of our youth. From every able-bodied man this Armed Peace exacts three, four, or five years of life when it is at its richest and brightest. When the youth steps into manhood and begins to dream of love and labour and of the sweet joys of home and family there swoops down upon him tho kidnapper of Mara and carries him off to the barracks and the camp. This vast organization for murder is the upas tree of civilization, and all the Continent is sickening under its fatal shade. The first cost is the cost in actual cash paid down, the second in life wasted at its prime, the I third in the condition of unrest which saps the sense of security necessary for the prose, cution of business. Business is difficult when peace is not worth three months’ purchase. Every year commerce becomes more and more international. Every year, therefore, any disturbance of peace becomes more dangerous to the trader. Even the shadow of war now produces far more serious dislocation of industry than in old times was caused by the actual progress 'of a campaign. For in old times every parish was a little world in itself, a microcosm capable of independent existence, and able to carry on its own business and grow its own crop if all the reßt of I the world was in measureless confusion. Today all this has changed. A network of rail arteries and telegraph nerves now knite all Europe into one organism. Workmen may

be thrown out of employment in Madrid because of a failure in Moscow. A swindle on the Bourse in Vienna may take the bread from the mouths of a hundred families in Baris. This extreme development of the nervous system of the Continent has gone on side by aide with the steady development of militarism, which, when it becomes active, either excites business to feverish and frenzied activity, or reduces it to a condition of paralysis. It is difficult to manceuvie an army without doing damage amid the rough and rustic hamlets of the peasantry, but in Europe we have at the same time multiplied the number of our armies and substituted for the cottagers’ huts edifices as fragile and as costly as the porcelain palaoes of the Chinese Emperors. All this it may be said is but one ol tne familiar truisms of the Peace Society. 1 do not pretend that it is any startling discovery. Would that it were so invincible as to be discovered ! It is like , a London fog in November. The whole Continent seems to be under some horrible enchantment. Ine Armed Peace sits like a vampire at the bedside of the people, draining their life-blood while they sleep. Hence, say some, war is certain. The nations cannot stand the strain much longer. Sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, tliay will rush to war rather than wait to be slowly suffocated by the sheer weight of their armour. WHAT WATt WOULD MEAN. * SooDer or later the natiooa will rush to war out of sheer impatience with the weight of their armour.’ So say many who do not think. But if they reflect for a moment what rushing to war means they will change their opinion. For as the Armed Peace is a nightmare fouler than the world has yet suffered, so the Next War is au appalling catastrophe from which imagination shrinks aghast. For there is nothing m modern history that it will resemble. Hitherto, down even to the last wars, when empires have gone to battle it has been a war of soldiers. The next war will be a war of peoples, In the Russo-Turkish war it was an army framed on the old which was repulsed at Plevna, and ultimately swept in triumph to Constantinople. In the Franco-German war the French army was largely professional, and it was because the standing army of professional soldiers went down like ninepins before the irresistible rush of an armed nation that all military systems have been revolutionized. Now every nation has armed all its able-bodied adults. In former days the mustering of half a million of soldiers was regarded as a mighty feat. To-day Prince Bismarck adds to the ranks of the army of the Fatherland, with one stroke of his pen, 700,000 fathers of families, and not a single voice is raised even in passing protest. Germany in the centre of Europe fronts east and west with an available host of three million trained soldiers. France will have between two and three millions ready to hand, Russia before long will be able to put five millions into line. Austria and Italy we need not count. The blast of the trumpets that proclaims the beginning of war will summon the manhood of Europe to the work of slaughter. Not only will the number of the combatants be far beyond those which were raised even in the days of the first Napoleon the Grand Army with which he crossed the frontier on his march to Moscow only consisted of the same number of men that haß been added this year to the German army—bnt the spirit in which it will be fonght ont will differ for the worse. Prince Bismarck has frankly told us what kind of a war it will be. We shall fight, he said, if we do fight, until we are bled as white as veal. It will be a duel to the death—a war in which the avowed obiect of the combatants is the utter destruction of their adversary. ‘ De saigrer k blanc,’ to dram the very life blood of your enemy until you leave his carcase as white as that of the calf from which the butcher seeks to drain every ruddy drop of gore—that is the declared ideal of the foremost nations of the Continent in the year of grace 1888. The imagination refuses to picture what it means. All our recent wars were short. Tne longest was that of the Crimea, which was little more than the siege and the defence of a single fortress by professional soldiers. The FrancoItalian war was almost an affair of weeks. The Danish war was over almost before it began. The Austro-Prussian-Italian war lasted just six weeks. The Franco-German war was over in six months. To bleed each other white, when both combatants are pretty well matched, and when there are millions of men in reserve, is an affair of vears.. But when all business is suspended, and the reapers have been summoned from the farms to the battle fields, it will be impossible to carry on war on this scale for years without utter collapse or ghastly famine. Hence the embattled millions will fight with the grim and desperate energy of men who know that, like Judas, what they do they must do quickly, They will strike terror. All the tourney rules of civilized war will be in danger of going by the board. It will be a contest of Titans waged with the ruthlessness of fiends. The next war will do in danger of degenerating into a nineteenthcentury version of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, on a scale far more gigantic, and therefore characterised by crimes far more Apart from the certainty of horrors to which the burning of Bazeilles and even the sack of Magdeburg would be bat as interludes in the infernal tragedy, there is another aspect of the struggle which is often overlooked. The new style of warfare, in which battles are fought, hot by a professional class set apart from the nation, governed by strict codes of military laws, and remaining apart from the activities of national existence, but by the nation itself, threatens to have most alarming results for humanity and civilization. We are able to see something of what it involves in the criminal statistics of Germany since the war. The conquest of France was one of the most expeditious and in many respects one of the least objectionable wars ever waged. But it brutalised the Germans to an extent chfficult to realise outside Germany. The citizen, plunged for six months into all the licence and savagery of war, acquired a taint from which he did not purge himself for years. War is the unloosing of all crimes, the sanctioning of all- violence, the negation of the sanctity of property and of life. To accustom men to war is to accustom them to

live in a world where the ordinary moral code is suspended. It does not easily reestablish its authority when peace is concluded. The criminal statistics of Germany sinoe IS7I show a terrible increase in all kinds of violent crime —murder, highway robbery, theft by violence, burglary, assaults on women and children—which after ten or fifteen years lias only now begun to decline. The violence put in practice against the enemy in France left iis poison in the blood of the Germans. What will be the effect upon civilization and humauity of accustoming ten millions of citizens to make murder their daily passion throughout a long war, in which every evil dormant in the human animal would be given free rein, no one can foresee. One thing only is certain, that the eonsequoneos would be far more hideous and deadly than any one has yet ventured to conceive. In face of such portentous possibilities it is difficult to find words adequate to condemn ths amazing and reckless criminality of those who, in the press and elsewhere, are continually flinging the firebrands of taunts, and sneers, and recriminations between the nations. When the avalanches tremble overhead even the fiol might oeaso to whistle; but these gentry, with this measureless catastrophe impending, go shouting and hallooing like a very Tom of Bedlam escaped from his keepers. It is sport to the fool to do mischief, and the madman lovcb to scatter firebrands and death ; but surely those journalists in London and elsewhere who * love to swell the warwhoop passionate for war ’ might at least reflect on the responsibilities of provoking a conflict which would have as its watchword *de saigner A blanc’ all round.