TWENTY YEARS OF WAR.

Temuka Leader, Volume 2, Issue 130, 19 March 1879, Page 3

TWENTY YEARS OF WAR.

From the siege of Sebastopol down to the fall of Plevna, there has been a succession of the bloodiest and costliest campaigns on record. The aggregate canage must be reckoned by millions of human beings, and the total expenditure by thousands of millions of pounds sterling-. It is the flower of the male population which is levied upon for the work of wholesale butchery. A man must be of good stature and sound of wind and limb in order to qualify him to stand up anc be shot at and to shoot at others on the field of battle. He is taken from the farm-yard and the factory, from the field and workshop, at the very period of life at which his productive powers are at their maximum. If he is returned to his former pursuits, he is probably mutilated, possibly demoralised. While he is on active service, so great is the wear and tear of clothing and war material, and so expensive are •all the arrangements connected with the commissariat of a modern army, that we should probably not err in assuming that the labor of three non-combatants is required for the support of every soldier in the field ; and, where the conscription prevails, it is the very young, the old, the feeble, the sickly, and the deformed who are left behind to till the soil, and to perform the labor of the workshop. When the war comes to an end, it entails calamitous consequences upon both the victors and vanquished ; for, even if the former should be partially or wholly recouped by the indemnity exacted from the enemy, this does not and cannot cover the immense losses sustained in consequence of the diminished productiveness of the population, arising out of the transformation of perhaps half-a-million of industrious civilians into trained and disciplined homicides. As to the nation which pays the indemnity, the amount thus ■extorted from it has to be borrowed. It is so much added to the public debt ; andjhe yearly interest has to be defrayed by increased taxation. Now, hearing in mind that Russia, Denmark, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the United States have all been involved, during the last twenty years, in wars conducted on a scale ot extraordinary magnitude, and that the mere outlay upon arms and ammunition for land forces must have been something enormous, without taking into account the cost of building armourplated vessels at half-a-million each—some of which have gone down at an accidental blow from the ram of a sister ship, in a fog, or when manoeuvring—we think it will be apparent that the -causes of the mercantile depression, and the manufacturing over-production, now complained of, lie very near the surface, and do not require any farfetched or elaborate explanations. War ■is A frightfully dear game to play at; *s?lnd, unlike Mercy, it is twice cursed ; it curses him that gives the heaviest blows, and him that takes them. It is the madness of monarchs, statesmen, and even peoples ; while it is the neverfailing scourge of the latter.