TWENTY YEARS OF WAR.

Otago Witness, Issue 1418, 25 January 1879, Page 23

TWENTY YEARS OF WAR.

From the siege of Sebastopol down to the fall of Plevna, there has bsen a succession of the bloodiest and costliest campaigns on record. The aggregate carnage must be reckoned by millions of human beings, and the total expenditure by thousands of millions of pounds sterling. It is the flower of tha mala population which is levied upon 'for the work of wholesale butchery. A man must be of good stature and sound of wind and limb in order to qualify him to stand up and be shot at and to shoot at others on the field of battk*. He is taken from the farmyard and the factory, from the field and the workshop, at the very period of life at which his productive powers are at their maximum. If he is returned to his former pursuits, he ia probably mutilated, possibly demoralised. While he is on active service, so great i 8 the wear and tear of clothing and war material, and so expensive are all the arrangements connected with the commissariat of a modern army, that we should probably not err in assuming that the labour of three noncombatants is required for the support of every soldier in the field ; and, where the conscripton prevails, it 13 the very young, the old, the feeble, the sickly, and the deformed who are left bshind to till tbe soil and to perform the labours of the workshop. When the war comes to an end, it entails calamitous consequences upon both the victors and vanquished ; for, even if the former shonld bo partially or wholly recouped by the indemnity exacted from the enemy, this does not and cannot cover tho immense losses sustained in consequence of the diminished productiveness of the population, arising out of the transformation of perhaps half-a-inillion of industrious civilians into trained, and disciplined bomicMes. As to the u.ii. ; oii m Lioli pa} a iha indemnity, the amount tltuu txloi'Led from it has to be borrowed. 10 is ao much adse<s to, ijhe public

debt j and the yearly interest has to be de. frayed by increased taxation. Now, bearing in mind that Russia, Den* mark, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the United States have all been involved, during the last twenty years, in wars conducted on a scale of extraordinary magnitude, and that the mere outlay upon arms and ammunition for land forces must have beea something enormous, without taking into account the cost of building armour-plated vessels at half-a-million each— some of which have gone down at an accidental blow from the ram of a sister ship, in a fog, or when manoeuvring — we think it will be apparent that the causes of the mercantile depression, and the manufacturing over- production, now complained of, lie very near the surface, and do not require any far fetched or elaborate explanations. War ia a frightfully dear game toplay at ; and, unlike mercy, it •is twice cursed ; it curses him that gives the heaviest blows and him that takes them. It is the madness of monarchs, statesmen, and even peoples ; while it i 3 the never- failing scourge of the latter.