OUR CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 89, 17 April 1871, Page 2

OUR CHRISTIAN CIVILISATION.

{From the Saturday Review.) There is a general impression that the Christian religion prevails more or less extensively in France and Germany. It is also held, by historical inquirers, that one of the characteristic tenets ..of that faith is that we should love our enemies, and do good to them that hate us. A considerable number of educated gentlemen preach this eccentric doctrine with more or less vigour, in many thousands of pulpits, every seventh day, and indeed, oftener, throughout the year. The mode in which the doctrine is exemplified. in practice must be admitted to be rather surprising. The main object of men of German race at the present moment is to throw into Paris a large number of explosive shells, in order to kill as many men, women, and children as possible, and thereby to torment the survivors by grievous mental anguish. Sometimes the shells in question only blowoff legs or arms, as no human machinery is perfect; but every resource of science is taxed to the uttermost to make them truly diabolical. Perhaps we ought to beg pardon for the epithet*, but the personage to whom we refer has .still a rather bad character amongst the inhabitants of this planet. . This unpleasant fact having been brought to the notice of the most celebrated German at present in existence, he has condescended to give us an exhaustive reply. He does not, indeed, trouble himself to refute the various stories which have been current as to atrocities perpetrated upon Frenchmen by Germans. They may or may not be true ; but at any rate there is an ample justification. Whatever Germany may have done, the French have been guilty of at least equally atrocious conduct. They have used missiles which not only kill, but inflict unnecessary torture. They have treacherously fired upon the German wounded. They have used flags of truce to conceal deadly designs. Instead of attending to the judicious regulations which ought to have deprived war of some of its horrors, they have done their best to retaliate upon the German forces some part of the miseries which they have endured. The treacherous Gaul, as we used to call him in the by-gone days of international antipathy, has been as great a brute as the humane and Sanskrit-reading German ; and of course the German cannot be seriously reproached if he takes advantage of his admirable scientific attainments, to inflict any degree of suffering upon his unscrupulous antagonist. Whatever we do, say the German, may be amply justified by precedents drawn from your practice ; and whatever we do, retorts the Frenchman, is nothing more than an.l

imitation of the brutality which you have sanctioned. We are not cui'ious to decide upon the degree of guilt attaching to either of the belligerent Powers. It may very possibly be true that every drop of blood spilt without just cause by one s^de is balanced by equally unprovoked bloodshed on the other. If the Ejynch were besieging Berlin, there might as grievous complaints from Dresden and Leipsig as we now hear from Orleans and Havre. We are content with simply remarking that the lessons of a teacher to whom both Sttte*profess to pay a certain respect appear to have been considerably modified in pEictice. " They didn't know every thih^r down in Judee," as one of the mostr brilliant humourists of our time has remarked ; and certainly the apostles — to say nothing of a more sacred name — appear to have been scandalously ill-informed as to the primary principles of human justice. The doctrine that you should do unto your neighbour as you would that he should do unto you involves a slight misunderstanding ; the true doctrine is, that you should do unto your neighbour as he would do unto you — if he had the chance. And yet, as we have been brought up more or less under the old system, we - cannot conceal that we have certain misgivings as to the strict propriety of the doctrine which is now being preached at the cannon's mouth. The reading of our morning newspaper has become rather a painful task. Oue ought to be iu a humane frame of miud at breakfast time, and to begin the day with a conviction that, if our fellow-creatures do not all love each other like brothers, they are at least able to regard their neighbours as something more than targets for ballpractice. We study the columns of the newspapers in the faint hope of discovering that some sort of recognition of our supposed relationship lingers, in spite of the lessons taught by military preachers. We must confess that hitherto our expectation has been generally disappointed. We rise from the perusal of the correspondence with a sense of profound melancholy. The descriptions of the contending armies are sad enough ; it is not cheering to trace the gradual rise of a bitter animosity which, so far as we can see, will outlast the lifetime of any one yet born into the world. It is a dreary prospect that, for anything we can see to the contrary, the Frenchmen and Germans whom we have been in the habit of regarding as .members of the same species, and equally interested in the general progress of the race, will be bitter enemies for another generation, and will very probably be thirsting for revenge when all who are now taking part in the quarrel have sunk into the grave. It is generally said that our powers of sympathy depend a good deal upon the geographical position of its objects. Our imagination refuses to realise sorrows from which we are separated by the distance of the earth's diameter, and inversely we ought to feel strongly for the inhabitants of a city which we have so often reached in a short day's journey. Yet, in one sense, the very closeness of the neighbourhood tends to increase our difficulty. We can bring up the Paris of last summer so distinctly before our mind's eye that it is hard to believe in the reality of the change. It is scarcely credible that shells should be bursting and human beings falling dead in the streets with which we are so familiar. The breach of continuity between the past and the present is too abrupt and too profound. We cannot bring the Paris of to-day and the Paris, as it almost seems, of yesterday together in our imaginations, and a vague sense of unreality perplexes our sympathies. Those who have personal relations with the sufferers may succeed in overcoming the difficulty ; and to others the columns of which we have spoken may supply the means of filling up the deails of the picture. We are half ashamed of eating and drinking and going about our daily business so comfortably whilst we are in the very presence, and almost within sight and sound, of this terrible drama ; but if we repent our own indifference, we have an easy means for shaking it off. No man not enwrapped in sevenfold stolidity can give his mind to the study for a few days without feeling a satisfactory amount of trahappinness. We do not mean to say that his sleep will be haunted by appalling phantoms, or, still less, that he will lose his appetite. That is a tribute which we pay -only to the memory of those who form almost part of ourselves. But he will acquire a stock of mournful meditations '-which, if it is painful enough at the time, may yet have its salutary uses. There are indeed one or two persons who can perambulate the streets, not only of London, hut of Paris, in a jaunty and facetious state of mind ; we envy their buoyancy of spirit, and are perhaps grateful for the amusement they afford us. Our national taste admits buffoonery into the deepest tragedies, and we cannot do without our jester to point out the grotesque side of the most 'heart-moving sc6nes of history. But the average humau- "being Will do better

we think, to keep his sense of humour within bounds just at the present moment, and may find a healthy discipline in the cultivation of an appropriate melancholy. According tb an ancient proverb, which we remember studying in our childhood in one of Bewick's quaint vignettes, " good times and bad times and all times pass over," and in another year or two. we may be laughiug and talking nonsense*amongst the remaining symptoms of the great historic siego. Till then, we would not, -if it were possible, shake off a sense of painful humiliation. *; It may be asked, indeed, with o»lyl4x)0 force, what is the use of lamenting •over the horrors of war ? It is a very old story ; war is, and always will be, a very ugly thing when stripped of its covering of romance ; and to insist upon one more proof of its ugliness is not a very profitable expenditure of human energy. The Quaker doctrine cannot yet be applied to international relations. Everybody, with some few exceptions, will admit that under many circumstances it would be our duty to go to war in order to preserve the respect for treaties or the independence of an oppressed nation. We admit, that is, that there are greater evils than those which we are lamenting, and diseases which require this tremendous surgery. To denounce war purely and simply means nothing but we are to allow brute force to have its own way in the world. Weeping and wringing of hands over bloodshed and outrage is indeed futile enough unless it is a preface to some practical substitute for our present mode of settling disputes. The process now taking place, revolting as it appears to bystanders, is, on the whole, the only plan hitherto devised by which certain problems, which must 1 - be solved in one way or another, can get themselves thoroughly worked out. Yet it is perhaps worth while to iusist occasionally on the extremely unsatisfactory nature of the system, in order to stimulate our anxiety to discover some efficient substitute; and still more to throw discredit upon those erroneous theories and evil passioos which must inevitable lead to war. For it is a most disagreeable reflection that, until that change has been effected, the tendency of improved civilisation is obviously to make wars more horrible than of old. The nearer men are brought together, the more intimately they are dependent upon each other's I services, and the greater the power given by improved methods of organisation for bringing the whole strength of a nation to bear upon a given point, the more serious will be the injuries inflicted, and the more bitter the animosities generated. It is frequently remarked that the extention of military service from a purely military class to a whole people is a retrograde step. In one sense it may be so; but it is only a natural consequence of all these complex changes which have made the union between different parts of a country far closer than was the case in former times. Telegraphs and railways are the instruments and material symbols of the social and intellectual forces which are steadily binding us more closely together, and ironclads and cannon of the occasional dangers produced by the approximation. The embittered character of the present contest is a proof that the development of our social machinery has proceeded much more rapidly than the development of the feelings which should correspond to it. We have come incomparably nearer to each other without learning to like each other much better than before, and the natural consequence is a terrible explosion, which does . more mischief in a month than a steady, respectable old war used to do in a year. It is the more necessary to insist in. due season upon the dangers thus fearfully illustrated, and likely to become more serious as time goes on. War will not be put down by simply denouncing it, for it is a symptom of a profound want of adaptation of pur present society to the conditions in which it is placed ; but such denunciations may not be quite worthless if they call attention to the importance of removing the causes of so horrible a symptom.