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Nelson Evening Mail, Volume VI, Issue 190, 12 August 1871, Page 4

Barbarity of Modern "Warfare. — Mr. John Ruakin, in his Fors Clavigera, comparing modern with ancient warfare, writes : — " We fight inelegantly as well as expensively, with machines instead of bow and spear ; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, in settling any quarrel — (Agincourt was won with the loss of less than a hundred meu ; only 25,000 English altogether were engaged at Creesy ; and 12,000, some say only 8,000, at Poictiers) ; we kill with far ghastlier wounds, crashiug bones and flesh together ; we leave our wounded necessarily for days and nights in heaps on the fields of battle ; we pillage districts twenty times as "large, and with complete destruction of more valuable property, and with a destruction as irreparable as it is complete ; for if the French or English burnt a church one day they could build a prettier one the next ; but the modern Prussians couldn't even build so much as an imitation one ; we rob on credit, by requisition, with ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim ; and we improve contention of arms, with contention of tougues, and we are able to multiply the rancour of cowardice, and mischief of lying, in universal and permanent print ; and so we lose our tempera as well as our money, and become, indecent in behaviour as in raggedness ; for whereas, in old time 3, two nations separated by a little pebbly stream like the Tweed, or even the two halves of one' nation, separated, by thirty fathoms' depth of ealt water (for most of the English

knights and all the English kings were French by race, and the best of them by birth also) — would go on pillaging and killing each other century after century, without the slightest ill-feelingtowards or disrespect for one another — we can neither give anybody a -beating courteously, nor take one in good part, or without screaming and lying about it.