DEBTOR AND CREDITOR ACCOUNT OF THE WAR.

Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, Issue 30, 27 April 1878, Page 4

DEBTOR AND CREDITOR ACCOUNT OF THE WAR.

Now, when the summer campaign is over, and a winter campaign is about to begin, it may be useful to make up a debtor and creditor accouut, showing how muoh has been so far lost and howmuch gained, by a peculiarly Christian and humanitarian war. W r e do not pretend that the reckoning is complete ; possibly a few itoms have to be added, but this our readers must do for themselves.

On the one side we have: — I—A hundred thousand men, or thereabouts, slaughtered, gashed, and mutilated.

2—Tens of thousands more dead of cold, fatigue, privation, and disease. 3—Very many others suffering from the same ills. (" Trains of sick are passing to the Danube by a thousand carts at a time.") 4—Home-Buffering to any degree within the compass of human imagination occasioned in hundreds of villages and towns.

s—Steady, wholesale destruction, through overwork, want of food, and the engines of war, amongst good useful beasts (these creatures being incapable of any enthusiasm of humanity.) (i—The crops, cattle, farmhouses of whole provinces ravaged and destroyed. Hundreds of villages burnt, and their inhabitants (such as have escaped murder) drift on the world.

7—Whole populations instructed in rape and massacre as a means of securing civil and religious liberty and practising the same.

B—All the waste of material which accompanies waste of life in warfare. Addition to an already grinding taxation to make goo.d this waste as it occurs. The certainty that increased taxation will he continued long after the war, to refurnish empty stores and arsenals, and to " reorganise " shattered forces. And a vast and incalculable loss in trade and industry.

9 —The rekindling, through the vast regions and over several populations, the most atrocious of all ferocities—religious hate.

10—The evil, whatever it may amount to, of familiarising mankind once more with the worst savageries of ancient uncivilised warfare, with wholesale slaughter, and the most reckless use of men's lives.

11—The spectacle of lying, hypocrisy, and rapacity passing for truth, virtue, and self-sacrifice. On the other side we have to reckon:

I—The lessons brought home to Turkey, and the prospect that that Empire, fast lapsing into corruption and destitude, may become purified and invigorated. 2—The solace of knowing that a largo part of the money lost to Turkish bondholders has so far ensured the protection of British interests.

3—The discovery of the true uses and purposes of autonomous provinces, and the explosion of various blunders and lies as to the condition of the Christian peasantry of Turkey. 4—The unveiling of a vast deal of political imposture abroad, and the timely detection of such dangerous nonsense at home.

s—Certain provinces, already blessed with a fruitful soil, made more fruitful for the future by the ashes of burned crops and the bodies "of slain men.

6—A large percentage of profit for several rich coutractois. —" Pull Mall Gazette."