Part 21

So far from talking puerilities about equality, we should all see that there are degrees in our vast family; the elder and stronger brethren are bound to succour the younger and weaker; the young must look up to their elders; and the Father of all will perhaps preserve peace among us if we only forget our petty selves and look to Him. Alas, it is so hard to forget self! The dullest of us can see how excellent and divine is brotherhood, if we do assuredly carry out the conception of fraternity thoroughly; but again I say, How hard it is to banish self and follow the teaching of our divine Brother! If we cast our eyes over the world now, we may see--perhaps indistinctly--things that might make us weep, were it not that we must needs smile at the childish ways of men. In the very nation that first chose to put forward the word "fraternity" as one of the symbols for which men might die we see a strange spectacle. Half that nation is brooding incessantly on revenge; half the nation is bent only on slaying certain brother human beings who happen to live on the north and east of a certain river instead of on the south and west. The home of the solacing doctrine of fraternity is also the home of incessant preparations for murder, rapine, bitter and brutal vengeance. About a million of men rise every morning and spend the whole day in practising so that they may learn to kill people cleverly; hideous instruments, which must cause devastation, torture, bereavement, and wreck, should they ever be used in earnest, are lovingly handled by men who hope to see blood flow before long. The Frenchman cannot yet venture to smite his Teutonic brother, but he will do so when he has the chance; and thus two bands of brethren, who might have dwelt together amicably, may shortly end by inflicting untold agonies on each other. Both nations which so savagely await the beginning of a mad struggle are supposed to be followers of the Brother whose sweet message is read and repeated by nearly all the men who live on our continent, yet they only utter bitter words and think sullen thoughts, while the more acrid of the two adversaries is the country which once inscribed "Brotherhood" on its very banners. All round the arena wherein the two great peoples defy each other the nations wait anxiously for the delivery of the first stroke that shall give the signal for wrath and woe; and, strangely, no one can tell which of the onlookers is the more fervent professor of our Master's faith. "Let brotherly love continue!"--that was the behest laid on us all; and we manifest our brotherly love by invoking the spirit of murder.

We know what exquisite visions floated around the twelve who first founded the Church on the principle of fraternity. No brother was to be left poor; all were to hold goods in common; every man should work for what he could, and receive what he needed; but evil crept in, and dissension and heart-burning, and ever since then the best of our poor besotted human race have been groping blindly after fraternity and finding it never. I always deprecate bitter or despondent views, or exaggerating the importance of our feeble race--for, after all, the whole time during which man has existed on earth is but as a brief swallow-flight compared with the abysmal stretches of eternity; but I confess that, when I see the flower of our race trained to become killers of men and awaiting the opportunity to exercise their murderous arts I feel a little sick at heart. Even they are compelled to hear the commands of the lovely gospel of fraternity, and, unless they die quickly in the fury of combat, their last moments are spent in listening to the same blessed words. It seems so mad and dreamlike that I have found myself thinking that, despite all our confidence, the world may be but a phantasmagoria, and ourselves, with our flesh that seems so solid, may be no more than fleeting wraiths. There is no one to rush between the scowling nations, as the poor hermit did between the gladiators in wicked Rome; there is no one to say, "Poor, silly peasant from pleasant France, why should you care to stab and torment that other poor flaxen-haired simpleton from Silesia? Your fields await you; if you were left to yourselves, then you and the Silesian would be brothers, worshipping like trusting children before the common Father of us all. And now you can find nothing better to do than to do each other to death!" Like the sanguine creatures who carried out the revolutionary movements of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1860, the weak among us are apt to cry out--"Surely the time of fraternity has come at last!" Then, when the murderous Empire, or the equally murderous Republic, or the grim military despotism arrives instead of fraternity, the weak ones are smitten with confusion. I pity them, for a bitterness almost as of death must be lived through before one learns that God indeed doeth all things well. The poor Revolutionists thought that they must have rapid changes, and their hysterical visions appeared to them like perfectly wise and accurate glances into the future. They were in a hurry, forgetting that we cannot change our marvellous society on a sudden, any more than we can change a single tissue of our bodies on a sudden--hence their frantic hopes and frantic despair. If we gaze coolly round, we see that, in spite of a muttering, threatening France and a watchful Germany, in spite of the huge Russian storm-cloud that lowers heavily over Europe, in spite of the venomous intrigues with which Austria is accredited, there are still cheerful symptoms to be seen, and it may happen that the very horror of war may at last drive all men to reject it, and declare for fraternity. Look at that very France which is now so electric with passion and suspicion, and compare it with the France of long ago. The Gaul now thinks of killing the Teuton; but in the time of the good King Henry IV. he delighted in slaying his brother Gaul. The race who now only care to turn their hands against a rival nation once fought among themselves like starving rats in a pit. Even in the most polished society the men used to pick quarrels to fight to the death. In one year of King Henry's reign nine thousand French gentlemen were killed in duels! Bad as we are, we are not likely to return to such a state of things as then was seen. The men belonged to one nation, and they ought to have banded together so that no foreign foe might take advantage of them; and yet they chose rather to slaughter each other at the rate of nearly one hundred and ninety per week. Certainly, so far as France is concerned, we can see some improvement; for, although the cowardly and abominable practice of duelling is still kept up, only one man was killed during the past twelve months, instead of nine thousand. In England we have had nearly two hundred years of truce from civil wars; in Germany the sections of the populace have at any rate stopped fighting among themselves; in Italy there are no longer the shameful feuds of Guelf and Ghibelline. It would seem, then, that civil strife is passing away, and that countries which were once the prey of bloodthirsty contending factions are now at least peaceful within their own borders.

If we reason from small things to great, we see that the squabbling nests of murderers, or would-be murderers, who peopled France, England, Germany, Austria, and Italy have given way to compact nations which enjoy unbroken internal peace. The struggles of business go on; the weak are trampled under foot in the mad rush of the cities of men, but the actual infliction of pain and death is not now dreamed of by Frenchman against Frenchman or German against German. We must remember that there never was so deadly and murderous a spirit displayed as during the Thirty Years' War, and yet the peoples who then wrestled and throttled each other are now peaceful under the same yoke. May we not trust that a time will come when nations will see on a sudden the blank folly of making war? Day by day the pressure of armaments is growing greater, and we may almost hope that the very fiendish nature of modern weapons may bring about a blessed _reductio ad absurdum_, and leave war as a thing ludicrous, and not to be contemplated by sane men! I find one gun specially advertised in our Christian country, and warranted to kill as many men in one minute as two companies of infantry could in five! What will be the effect of the general introduction of this delightful weapon? No force can possibly stand before it; no armour or works can keep out the hail of its bullets. Supposing, then, that benevolent science goes on improving the means of slaughter, must there not come a time when people will utterly refuse to continue the mad and miserable folly of war? Over the whole of Britain we may find even now the marks of cannon-shot discharged by Englishmen against the castles of other Englishmen. Is there one man in Britain who can at this present moment bring his imagination to conceive such an occurrence as an artillery fight between bodies of Englishmen? It is almost too absurd to be named even as a casual supposition. So far has fraternity spread. Now, if we go on perfecting dynamite shells which can destroy one thousand men by one explosion; if we increase the range of our guns from twelve miles to twenty, and fight our pieces according to directions signalled from a balloon, we shall be going the very best way to make all men rise with one spasm of disgust, and say, "No more of this!"

We cannot hope to do away with evil speaking, with verbal quarrelling, with mean grasping of benefits from less fortunate brethren. Alas, the reign of brotherhood will be long in eradicating the primeval combative instinct; but, when we compare the quiet urbanity of a modern gathering with the loud and senseless brawling which so often resulted from social assemblies even at the beginning of this century we may take some heart and hope on for the best. Our Lord had a clear vision of a time when bitterness and evil-doing should cease, and His words are more than a shadowy prediction. The fact is that, in striving gradually to introduce the third of the conditions of life craved by the poor feather-witted Frenchmen, the nations have a comparatively easy task. We cannot have equality, physical conditions having too much to do with giving the powers and accomplishments of men; we can only claim liberty under the supreme guidance of our Creator; but fraternity is quite a possible consummation. Our greatest hero held it as the Englishman's first duty to hate a Frenchman as he hated the Devil; now that mad and cankered feeling has passed away, and why should not the spread of common sense, common honesty, bring us at last to see that our fellow-man is better when regarded as a brother than as a possible assassin or thief?

Our corporate life and progress as nations, or even as a race of God's creatures, is much like the life and progress of the individual. The children of men stumble often, fall often, despair often, and yet the great universal movement goes on, and even the degeneracy which must always go on side by side with progress does not appreciably stay our advance. The individual man cannot walk even twenty steps without actually saving himself by a balancing movement from twenty falls. Every step tends to become an ignominious tumble, and yet our poor body may very easily move at the rate of four miles per hour, and we gain our destinations daily. The human race, in spite of many slips, will go on progressing towards good--that is, towards kindness--that is, towards fraternity--that is, towards the gospel, which at present seems so wildly and criminally neglected. The mild and innocent Anarcharsis Clootz, who made his way over the continent of Europe, and who came to our little island, in his day always believed that the time for the federation of mankind would come. Poor fellow--he died under the murderous knife of the guillotine and did little to further his beautiful project! He was esteemed a harmless lunatic; yet, notwithstanding the twelve millions of armed men who trample Europe, I do not think that Clootz was quite a lunatic after all. Moreover, all men know that right must prevail, and they know also that there is not a human being on earth who does not believe by intuition that the gospel of brotherhood is right, even as the life of its propounder was holy. The way is weary toward the quarter where the rays of dawn will first break over the shoulder of the earth. We walk on hoping, and, even if we fall by the way, and all our hopes seem to be tardy of fruition, yet others will hail the slow dawn of brotherhood when all now living are dead and still.

_September, 1888._

_LITTLE WARS_.

Just at this present our troops are engaged in fighting various savage tribes in various parts of the world, and the humorous journalist speaks of the affairs as "little wars." There is something rather gruesome in this airy flippancy proceeding from comfortable gentlemen who are in nice studies at home. The Burmese force fights, marches, toils in an atmosphere which would cause some of the airy critics to faint; the Thibetan force must do as much climbing as would satisfy the average Alpine performer; and all the soldiers carry their lives in their hands. What is a little war? Is any war little to a man who loses his life in it? I imagine that when a wounded fighter comes to face his last hour he regards the particular war in which he is engaged as quite the most momentous affair in the world so far as he is concerned. To me the whole spectacle of the little wars is most grave, both as regards the nation and as regards the individual Britons who must suffer and fall. Our destiny is heavy upon us; we must "dree our weirde," for we have begun walking on the road of conquest, and we must go forward or die. The man who has the wolf by the ears cannot let go his hold; we cannot slacken our grip on anything that once we have clutched. But it is terrible to see how we are bleeding at the extremities. I cannot give the figures detailing our losses in little wars during the past forty years, but they are far worse than we incurred in the world-shaking fight of Waterloo. Incessantly the drip, drip of national blood-shedding goes on, and no end seems to be gained, save the grim consciousness that we must suffer and never flinch. The graves of our best and dearest--our hardy loved ones--are scattered over the ends of the earth, and the little wars are answerable for all. England, in her blundering, half-articulate fashion, answers, "Yes, they had to die; their mother asked for their blood, and they gave it." So then from scores of punctures the life-blood of the mother of nations drops, and each new bloodshed leads to yet further bloodshed, until the deadly series looks endless. We sent Burnes to Cabul, and we betrayed him in the most dastardly way by the mouth of a Minister. England, the great mother, was not answerable for that most unholy of crimes; it was the talking men, the glib Parliament cowards. Burnes was cut to pieces and an army lost. Crime brings forth crime, and thus we had to butcher more Afghans. Every inch of India has been bought in the same way; one war wins territory which must be secured by another war, and thus the inexorable game is played on. In Africa we have fared in the same way, and thus from many veins the red stream is drained, and yet the proud heart of the mother continues to beat strongly. It is so hard for men to die; it is as hard for the Zulu and the Afghan and the Ghoorka as it is for the civilized man, and that is why I wish it were Britain's fortune to be allowed to cease from the shedding of blood. If the corpses of the barbarians whom we have destroyed within the past ten years could only be laid out in any open space and shown to our populace, there would be a shudder of horror felt through the country; yet, while the sweet bells chime to us about peace and goodwill, we go on sending myriads of men out of life, and the nation pays no more heed to that steady ruthless killing than it does to the slaughter of oxen. Alas!

Then, if we think of the lot of those who fight for us and slaughter our hapless enemies by deputy as it were, their luck seems very hard. When the steady lines moved up the Alma slope and the men were dropping so fast, the soldiers knew that they were performing their parts as in a vast theatre; their country would learn the story of their deed, and the feats of individuals would be amply recorded. But, when a man spends months in a far-off rocky country, fighting day after day, watching night after night, and knowing that at any moment the bullet of a prowling Ghilzai or Afridi may strike him, he has very little consolation indeed. When one comes to think of the matter from the humorous point of view--though there is more grim fact than fun in it--it does seem odd that we should be compelled to spend two thousand pounds on an officer's education, and then send him where he may be wiped out of the world in an instant by a savage little above the level of the Bushman. I pity the poor savages, but I certainly pity the refined and highly-trained English soldier more. The latest and most delightful of our Anglo-Indians has put the matter admirably in verse which carries a sting even amidst its pathos. He calls his verses "Arithmetic on the Frontier."

A great and glorious thing it is To learn for seven years or so The Lord knows what of that or this, Ere reckoned fit to face the foe, The flying bullet down the pass, That whistles clear, "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent On making brain and body meeter For all the murderous intent Comprised in villainous saltpetre! And after--ask the Yusufzaies What comes of all our 'ologies.

A scrimmage in a border station, A canter down some dark defile-- Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail! The crammer's boast, the squadron's pride Shot like a rabbit in a ride.

No proposition Euclid wrote, No formulae the text-book know, Will turn the bullet from your coat Or ward the tulwar's downward blow; Strike hard who cares--shoot straight who can-- The odds are on the cheaper man.

One sword-knot stolen from the camp Will pay for all the school expenses Of any Kurrum Valley scamp Who knows no word of moods and tenses, But, being blessed with perfect sight, Picks off our messmates left and right.

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem; The troop-ships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam, To slay Afridis where they run. The captives of our bow and spear Are cheap, alas, as we are dear!