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Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2531, 29 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

New York city has in round numbers 3,100 women teaching in its public schools. Brooklyn has 1,600 wemen teachers. While Mr Stead, editor of the .Pirll Mall Gazette, was in Russia he seut Home to his paper a series of very interesting, though, of course, too, sensational articles entitled ' Peace or War ? ' In one of these he gives his idea as to " what war would mean." He thinks that those people who say that sooner or later the nations will rush to war out of sheer impatience with the weight of their armour fail to notice the responsibility which will be involved in the declaration of the next great war. " For as the armed peace is a nightmare fouler than the world as yet suffered, so the next war is an appalling catastrophe from which imagination shrinks aghast. For there is nothing in modern history that will resemble." Mr Stead points out that, whereas hitherto when nations have gone to battle it. has been a war of soldier?, the next war will be a war of peoples." In the KubsoTurkish war it was an army framed on tho old system, which was ropulten at Plevna and ultimately swept in triumph to Constautinople. In tho Franco-German war tho Vrench Army was largely professional, and it was because the standing army of professional soldiers wont down like nine-pins before the irresistible rush of au armod nation that the whole military systutn has been revolutionised. Now every nation has urmed all its ablebodied adult.". In former duys ihe mustering of half a million of soldiers was regarded as a mighty feat. To-day Prince liismark adds to the ranks of the army of the Fatherland, with one stroke of his pen, 700,000 fathers of families, and not a single voice is raised even in passing protest." Germany, it is pointed out, fronts east and west with an available host of three million trained soldiers France will soon have between two and three million ; Russia will soon have five million. " The blast of the trumpets that proclaims the beginning of war will summon the manhood of lurope to the woi'k of. slaughter,"