objects and principles, under the influence of which our Continent is about to take another leap forward, and to descend into a new and ultimately stabler system of power through the cataracts of war.

How well do we remember the happy idea which first rose into the mind of philosophers in the time of our youth, and which it was reckoned the mark of an 'advanced mind" to entertain! How comfortably and complacently it was proclaimed that progress in the arts of war was inevitaby suicidal, and destined to make an end of all war! That was forty or more years ago, at the time when the first small advances were made in military weapons and enginery -before even the old "Brown Bess' had been withdrawn from the hands of our soldiery; but when the great outburst of mechanical science and invention had fully begun, and was devoting its mere spare moments to the art of destruction. How confidently it was then demonstrated from the schoolmaster's or professor's chair that the various arms of precision," then in their infancy, would render battles so overwhelmingly destructive that it would be too absurd to engage in them; or that, if the nations were not sufficiently intelligent to perceive this sanguinary absurdity, they would quickly be made to learn the lesson from sheer lack of what Napoleon called chair à cannon-from the impossibility of raising armies sufficiently numerous to withstand or survive such wholesale slaughter.

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It was a pretty idea, opening on the whole a highly gratifying prospect. Make war sufficiently destructive, and you will destroy war itself! It had all the neatness, and apparently the conclusiveness, of an axiom in geometry. And so, while the profanum vulgus congratulated themselves upon the augmented fighting power of our soldiery and defensive armaments, the Illuminati rejoiced to see the very passion for war giving birth to a wholly new state of affairs which would abolish war throughout the civilized world. They did not adequately remember what a combative animal Man is, or how mankind have continued to fight at least as much as ever, despite the displacement of the feeble

bow and arrows by gunpowder and artillery.

war

Nevertheless this happy idea would not have proved so far wrong had the world remained in other respects as it was-namely, inter alia, with only such standing armies as kings and princes could command from semi-somnolent but poor and reluctant peoples. But in this matter, as in so many others, the world with the fashion thereof has changed greatly. It is doubtful whether was ever merely "the game of kings," except in the sense that kings were then the sole representatives and guardians of national rights and interests, among peoples who knew little or nothing of what was happening outside their own villages, and to whom geography, even of the most neighboring countries, was as unknown as that of the moon. at the present day. But it is the special boast of this nineteenth century that nations have become their own governors; while it is a fact of history that, with increasing knowledge of geography and politics, the nations now show quite as belligerent a spirit, as keen a sense of affront, and as resolute an ambition to promote and defend their country's interests. And thus, when the war-spirit arises, the belligerent armies are no longer limited in number by the privy purse or narrow revenue of a king of a hundred years ago; but nations themselves take up arms; while the marvellous growth of Wealth during the last fifty years, more than suffices to equip and put in motion military forces tenfold as numerous and formidable as was possible of yore. Thus, while progress in science and growth of wealth render the enginery of war appallingly destructive, one result of political progress has been to supply both the sinews of war" and "food for gunpowder" in almost unlimited quantity-fleets mailed in iron, and armies sufficiently numerous wield, at times, a thousand pieces of artillery, and to survive even the carnage of a Sedan!

to

Good reader, pray reflect upon the various circumstances briefly summarized in the preceding paragraphs. They are familiar to you in our own country. Indeed the drilling and marching, and grand military gatherings and reviews

even of our civic soldiery, as they go on among us, would make any returned spirit of father or grandfather believe that a more than Napoleonic war was raging over Europe, while some new Grand Army was again encamped on the heights of Boulogne, waiting for a favorable moment to cross over into Kent. It is a curious circumstance that the most-forgotten or least remembered great incidents in our famous heart-stirring history are the successful invasions and occasional actual conquests of our Island from the adjoining continent. Often and by many different powers and races have our Isles been so visited in warlike guise. Julius Cæsar, whose headquarters or "military base," to use the scientific phrase-were far away in Italy, beyond Alps and Apennines, with rivers and sea between, in sheer spirit of adventure seeking our fogshrouded coast, "came, and saw, and conquered," leaving the Britains" for four centuries thereafter an infertile province of Imperial Rome. Next came German and Norseman; Hengist with his Saxon followers of the White Horse; Kanute with his Danes, and other Scandinavian Vikings in their dragonprowed war-galleys, flying the Raven flag. Then came William with his Normans; and, noteworthy fact, hardly had the Conquerer crowned himself in Westminister Abbey, than he established the Wardenship of the Cinque Ports, fortifying these now humble seaports, and endowing them with special privileges in return for their guardianship of our Channel coast, the Norman sagaciously closing against others the door by which he himself had entered! Then, in milder fashion, followed the baffled landings of French kings, as in the feeble reign of King John, when the French monarch miscarried sadly in the Fen country, and (according to an answer given to a Civil Service Examiner in English history) "lost all his clothes at the Wash." By-and-by came the halfwelcomed invasion of Lancastrian Richmond-and again, of William of Orange; and again, the brilliant and all but successful adventure of Prince Charlie' of the Royal Stuart line. We prefer to think of the wreck of the Invincible Armada from Spain; of the failure of James the Second in Ireland,

as also of the French Revolutionary expedition in the same disaffected part of the kingdom a century later; and finally, of our defiance of Napoleon's Grand Army encamped on the heights of Boulogne-so grandly baffled by the genius of Nelson, who died in the hour of victory which completed the success of his career, by leaving not a single hostile navy-nay, not a European navy of any kind, to contest with England the empire of the seas, or even to molest our mercantile argosies as they traversed far and wide the oceans of the world. Yet only last century, during our regretted contest with our American colonies, did not the allied fleets of the Continent for a while hold the mastery; while Paul Jones in privateering fashion harried our coasts; as at another and earlier time the victorious Dutch Admiral sailed up the Thames and created a panic in the English metropolis?

Ours has been a splendid history; and despite our modern excellency in textile industry, and such like needful arts of peace, nothing shines forth so strikingly in our whole history as that more-than-Roman fighting power of our people, as remarkable in onset as in defence-a personal quality, beyond, yet including, the belligerent skill which belongs to military drill and discipline, and which was displayed afresh, but as yesterday, at Tel-el-Kebir. Justly we are proud of our history; justly, too, we can find in it no small assurance of abiding security for our coasts and homes" so long as England to herself proves true. Yet the very fact that this old confidence, a superb insouciance, has become shaken in men's minds, is one more and not the least significant sign of the changing times. How different is the national sentiment on such matters now from what it was just thirty years ago! Then there was no Militia, no Volunteers, and our military and naval establishments were pitifully small and neglected. "I tell you," said the Duke of Wellington in the spring of 1852, "for the last ten years you have not had more men in your armies than are sufficient to relieve your sentries in the different parts of the world.' when Lord Hardinge became head of the War Department in that same year, he found only forty guns in the United

And

Kingdom capable of service, most of which," he added, would have gone to pieces the first time they got into a clay-field!" Our navy was in a similar state of neglect. Indeed, at that time, Lord John Russell (in accordance with Sydney Smith's saying) might even with impunity have displayed his overweening self-confidence by " taking command of the Channel fleet," seeing there was so little of it, or, as we should think now, none at all! Yet our people were content; they were conscious of no danger, nor even of liability to it. Nay, more; peace-fanatics like Cobden furiously railed against Wellington for exhorting the nation to measures of selfdefence. It was indeed a sign of the times when a man like Cobden could insult the victor of Waterloo by an accusation of timidity, deriding the Iron Duke for weak nerves and mental imbecility, and yet rely for countenance in these insulting slanders upon a considerable portion of the public! Through the cover importunity of his widow, Cobden's bust has got a place in the purlieus of the House of Commons; but (not to speak of his low-bred insults) what does the country think of the question between him and Wellington now? Wellington and Cobden! Truly it was a peculiar time when the names of such two men could be bracketed together in approximate equality, not to say with the Manchester manufacturer" in a self-assumed superiority!

In this matter, at least-as indeed in many others the good sense, sound judgment, and clear military perception of Wellington have been amply vindicated. The exhortation which he then so earnestly addressed to his fellowcountrymen was all the more needed, inasmuch as the whole current of public feeling then ran in the opposite direction. The middle point of the century witnessed a singular development of hope and of self-satisfaction. The Continental troubles were over; the golddiscoveries were the talk of the day, and seemed to betoken an epoch of commercial and general prosperity, the reverse of what had so grievously prevailed for a generation before. The Great Exhibition was partly the outcome of this state of things, and remarkably intensified it. It was the "Palace of Peace"

-the "Palace of All Nations'-a "World's Fair," where all peoples and races came together in peaceful and prosperity-making rivalry. In the cosmopolitan philanthropy which then inspired all breasts, even the impudent Chinaman who made himself conspicuous on the occasion, as a high Mandarin, was received without questioning as a welcomed representative of the hitherto self-secluded Celestial Empire. War was to be a thing of the past; and instead of the conflicts of monarchies and the fiery collision of armies, there was to be a brotherhood of nations, and the only rivalry a series of Great Exhibitions all over the civilized world. Under such a sunshine of general happiness and hope, no wonder that even Cobdenism and the Manchester School obtained a brief heyday of exotic existence; or that Parliament and Ministries sought to show their enlightenment, and prove themselves abreast of the times," by seeing how little could be spent upon our military and naval armaments. National defences !" the words were never heard; or, when earnestly uttered by the "Old Duke," they remained without an echo! yet, within little more than a year, the legions of the Czar crossed the Pruth, and the Long Peace-the peace of Waterloo-was broken and ended by the salvoes of the Russian artillery on the Danube.

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And

on by the former Power; then the Franco-German war, likewise a coolly premeditated affair on one side; then another Russo-Turkish war, similarly forced upon the weaker Power, by which the Czar carried a step further the traditional ambition of his dynasty and people. All this within twenty years! All, too, of set purpose ! No wonder, then, that the current of human ideas has been reversed, and that the prime consideration of every nation is now of self-defence-measures of self-preservation. Thirty years ago was a brief and delusive heyday when "public opinion" and "moral force' were hopefully exalted and extolled as the predominant power of the future ! Alas! what have we seen in the interval, and what do we see

now, but the old, old story" that has been in course ever since the birth of man (ay, and throughout all creation so far as human observation extends), that "Might makes Right,' Right," that moral force is mighty only in so far as it is transmutable at a push into bayonets and cannon; and that it is upon big battalions" and ironclad ships that the fortunes and independence of States and nations still mainly depend.

race.

Nor are the signs of trouble all external, or confined to the attack of State upon State, and of race upon Most pitiful of all, is not Civilization itself upon its trial? The fabric of Society which, under the guidance of Christianity, Europe has been slowly building up since our continent emerged from the Dark Ages—even it-our boast and highest achievement-is not exempt from the coming perils. The very social organization of which we are justly proud, where in we boast that individual and political freedom has reached a perfection hitherto unknown in the world, strong as it now stands, or seems to stand, is there not visibly a day of trial approaching even for it? It is, or may be, the highest form of the social union yet attained; but is it to stand, and progress steadily with successive generations in unbroken course to a higher level? Even those who hope, as we do, that such may be its destiny, may yet have forebodings of a dire temporary breaking down, under a dread gust or sudden triumph of that Evil by which so many a good and beautiful

thing has been swept away as by an unmerited fate, and which appears inseparably interwoven in the web of sublunary affairs. And though we recoil from the thought that our modern civilization may perish as utterly as that of Nineveh and Babylon, of the Pharaohs, and of mighty Rome herself; still, he is an ignorant man who does not know that in the garden of the world there are no plants of perennial growth, and a blind one, if he does not mark how widely the red fires of destruction already smoulder under our household gods, threatening to burst forth and consume our social civilization, the stately fabric of European society. Are there no fears lest this grand outcome of the European Aryans may not totter and fall, as that of other races and ancient peoples has fallen; or at least that, in giving birth to some new development, it may not be rolled up like a blazing scroll, and temporarily perish in the flames of Atheism and Materialism, with their natural progeny among the masses, Communism and Nihilism? Nay, what is the latter of these shapes of evil but a belief that there is no hope for mankind unless the entire Past be destroyed along with the Present, and that the whole beliefs, sentiments, and ideas with which, in their past career, the human race have become imbued, must give place to a tabula rasa for the New Science which knows neither God nor a Future Life. Take away these noble and elevating beliefs, and how will it fare with the civilization which those beliefs have inspired, and of which they are the stablest pillars? No system of government and society has ever yet stood without God and a future life; or if there be one (as is almost true), it has been slowly shaped to that complexion through long generations of (what may be styled) agnostic yet reverential Deism: a civilization, too, which certainly is not an outcome of Aryanism, whether pagan or Christian.

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How direly may the operation of such dissolving forces" of society, whether interweaved with or consequent upon it, complicate the course or aggravate the disasters of any new great war in Europe! We must reserve for the wider space of another article an exposition as to the forces, interests, and op

portunities in the European world which seem to be tending toward a severe international conflict, a climax to the gradual drifting away from the long peace enjoyed by our fathers, and from the European Settlement which followed the victory of Waterloo; a painful preliminary, also, to the New Settlement which eventually will give repose to our continent, which for nigh two thousand years has been the heart of the world's civilization, and also, alas! the chief fountain of its wars. By conquest and by settlement, the European peoples have spread far and wide over the earth; and this extra-European rivalry is now more than ever swelling the causes of strife in our own continent, while opening new means for, and adding fresh attractions to, the mastery of power.

Here we may stop. The omens of trouble to which we have called attention are serious enough in themselves, without the help of fancy or superstition. Yet-strange though it may be to think of-there are masses of mankind to whom considerations like those here passed in review are of little weight, yet who readily jump to the same conclusion from signs in the sky and omens which they find in the great cycles of Time, or again, like the late Dr. Cumming and others, in the interpretation of prophetical and apocalyptic lore. The comet recently in our skies, whose apprehended collision with the great solar orb inspired grave misgivings as to the fate of our planet even in the mind of Science, together with the approaching close of the second thousand years after Christ-actually beget forebodings of coming troubles among a hundred or thousand times larger portion of mankind than that which ponders, or even reads, the news and politics of the day! In truth, even what we call "civilized mankind" is a highly composite material. The original ideas and mental habits of human nature are singularly permanent in the face of training and education. The stream of civilization flows not in a straight and uniform course, like the water which we enclose in pipes and conduits, but rather like a native river with its streams and pools, where on the surface progress is swift and steady, but where in the depths the

water hardly moves, and the logs and clods brought so far by the river settle down and may remain for years. So is it with the march of civilization; which may be likened to a railway upon which the first, second, and third class carriages travel at different speeds, so that the Firsts may be at Berwick or Edinburgh, while the Thirds are hardly beyond the purlieus of King's Cross or St. Pancras. Much-far too much-of Man the Barbarian is to be found in the masses of all civilized society; and when so matter-of-fact a scientist as the late and too-soon-lost Professor Jevons attributed a relationship between our commercial crises (with the speculative mania which accompanies them) and the changing condition of the sun, we need not wonder that there are large masses of mankind-ay, by far the majority of the genus homo-who find in the skies and in the grand cycles of Time, omens and portents which they vastly prefer to deductions (which they cannot make) from the current course of affairs in the world around them. Yet, noteworthy it is, that the approaching date of some momentous change in the condition of mankind, which now stirs with the expectation the vast Mohammedan world should also be similarly regarded by some classes in both the Jewish and Christian worlds.*

Very different, and of much humbler pretention, are the signs of trouble of which we here write-hard and disagreeable facts pertaining to our own terrestrial world-signs and circumstances which actually envelop daily life, alike in our own and Continental countries. Europe a series of camps-nations in

*Hardly had we written these lines than we read the following confirmative statement by our accomplished astronomer and man of science, Mr. R. Proctor, who, in an essay on 'Pyramid Prophecies," states that in the course of his many journeyings, both in the Old World and the New, and both in the northern and southern hemisphere, "I have come to the conclusion that certainly one half of the educated classes, and 99-100ths, if not all of the uneducated classes, still believe in (omens and prophecies) what modern science has utterly rejected.'

He adds: " According to Pyramid prophets, the year 1882 is the one on which some great

change, closing the Christian era (as such), is either to be brought about, or is to begin.' Contemporary Review.