tion and all the other equipments for vengeance upon the offender, the Sixth Commandment is the only one in which a breach becomes more pardonable in proportion to the number engaged in committing it. The more people conspire to break the Commandment, the more easily they are forgiven; until, when a certain degree of complicity has been passed, their deed becomes not merely venial, but glorious. "Thou shalt not kill"; but let a thousand or two go killing, and their action passes from murder into war. War is the chief source of glory, and as the Penguins said of their great Trinco, who brought the race to utter ruin, "glory never costs too much."

It is an old theme for satire, and if ridicule killed, war would be dead as its victims. A century ago man was still sometimes defined as a reasonable being. No one would use the definition now, but still reason is believed to enter into some of man's motives. Yet neither ridicule nor reason has killed war; neither has had much effect on it. To most people, history still means a succession of wars, and when we think of any century it usually takes a particular color according to its battles. In compiling a history of "War and Peace" for the Home University Library (Williams & Norgate), Mr. G. H. Perris has found it necessary to compress into 250 pages, if not universal history, at all events the history of Europe, and parts of Asia and America. For if he omitted any portion of that history, he would omit war, which is his theme. He has accomplished the task with remarkable skill; but it is lucky for him that the science of opposites is the same, or else we might be asking why "Peace" is mentioned in the title at all. From the beginning to the last few pages, peace hardly breaks out, but from his summary of wars a fairly complete knowledge of history may be gained.

It is the same in the new edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica." What space is given to wars, and rightly given! With what exactness the course of all campaigns is followed, the positions of the armies being illustrated by maps, so that there may be no mistake about them, the totals of the men slaughtered or disabled during the war recorded or conjectured! If one did not know it beforehand, one could learn from these pages the existence of a whole class of men whose duty or pleasure it is to investigate and keep in memory the tracks along which armies have passed, the means by which they were fed, the bits of hill or plain they have occupied, the methods by which they tried to kill each other, and the extent of their success in the attempt. Darwin observing the movements of earthworms was not more scientifically accurate. Scholars have spent less commentary on the noblest literature. In some of the articles, as in the account of the French Revolutionary Wars that culminated in Napoleon's Italian campaigns, the story is told with a delight and infectious enthusiasm such as peaceful benefactors of mankind never inspire. And what vast industrial movement has ever excited the intensity of interest, or the minuteness of criticism, with which the movement of Moltke's armies upon Sedan is still followed by thousands of readers from year to year?

As to the causes of all this slaughter, the average murderer's motives appear rational and respectable in comparison. Time is thought to increase man's wisdom, but as we turn the records even of recent centuries, what insanity the avowed origins of war suggest! Spanish successions, Austrian successions, Renunciations, Pragmatic sanctions, Archduke This against Elector The Other as though it mattered to the men who died which in a line of fools ruled over them! Hamlet wondered

that twenty thousand men should go to their graves like beds for a fantasy and trick of fame, or fight for a plot which was not tomb enough to hide the slain. But a suburban garden would be better reason for contest than the claims of half-imbecile kings, to which thousands on thousands have been sacrificed. Take the killed alone in the war between the two most civilized countries of Europe only forty years ago. The "Encyclopædia" tells us that the German killed numbered 28,000, the French 156,000 (not reckoning the 145,000 disabled on both sides together). Large numbers of those dead might be living at this moment if Bismarck had not deliberately garbled a telegram. In a moment of meditative retrospect, he said afterwards that he had made it all right with God. One is glad to hear it, for the deed called for some rectification. But what are now the feelings of the Archdukes and other courtiers of the Tsar when they think of the dead round Mukden, and remember those timber concessions on the Yalu which made them clamor for the war? Cain, who did the first murder, was more justified than they.

We do not wish here to expose the motives of rulers, or to add up the corpses that have served them. We would speak rather of that other side of war recalled by Mr. Galsworthy's recent letter on the use of aeroplanes. The relation of art and science to war has long afforded another opportunity to satirists. From the time when hairy man just tied a gut to a heavy stone, or pointed a shaving of flint, the chief use of invention and discovery has frequently been slaughter, and human skill has reached its height when devoted to bloodshed. How swiftly man adapted for death the smelted iron, the horse's back, the marvel of the spring, whether in bows or in the catapult that hurled rocks four hundred yards through the air, the work

manship of steel, the artistry of Spanish metals, the explosive power of chemicals in combination, the speed and steadiness given by a spin, the timefuse, the floating iron, the twisting propellers at the stern, the flashing mirrors, and the current that speeds invisible! There is hardly a scientific miracle or form of art that man has not turned to the destruction of man. And now, after infinite effort and innumerable ages, he has invented à machine by which, with frightful risk and labor and noise, he can accomplish what our ancestral lizards managed fairly well, and what any albatross does to perfection without the visible movement of a feather. Hardly is the miraculous attained, and man moves through the air unsupported even by gas, when the latest marvel of invention is diverted to a means of killing men. All the military staffs of Europe are busy with their aeroplanes. Our own panic-stricken patriots raise almost as much clamor over them as over Dreadnoughts. The cry of "Two wings to one!" will soon arise from the "Observer's" office. The dawn will again become a wonder when terror sees it flecked with aerial navies, and citizens will turn a penetrating glance upwards to the central blue in hourly apprehension. Already M. Prier has given them the shivers with his picture of five hundred aeroplanes leaving London at breakfast-time, destroying Paris at lunch, and returning in time to dress for dinner in Piccadilly. was considerate of the Frenchman thus to arrange the picture, but citizens know it might have been turned the other way round. London is a bigger mark, the dinners in Paris are superior, and knowing this they tremble.

It

With fearful eye fixed only on our sea-power (perhaps less than double the power of a possible enemy), the Bishop of Liverpool has been saying "we can no longer regard ourselves as

secure because our shores spurn back the ocean's roaring tide." He has beheld "a vision, an awful vision, of a foreign host upon our fertile shores, of burning homesteads, of meadows reeking with English blood, spilled lavishly, and perhaps spilled in vain." That is, indeed, a terrible warning, coming from one of those ecclesiastical authorities who so often devote their leisure moments to the contemplation of war. But if the thought of aeroplanes had occurred to his mind, we hardly know what extra colors he could have found to paint his vision awful enough. Between the European world and such trips to Paris as M. Prier has proposed, it seems as though nothing stood but a rather dubious sheet of paper. At the first Hague Conference, Count Mouravieff proposed the prohibition of all missiles from balloons, but this country, always behindhand in reducing the horrors of war, refused consent. the end the prohibition was agreed to for five years only, and at the second Hague Conference the renewed proposal was rejected by seventeen Powers. All that could be agreed upon was the prohibition of projectiles and explosives hurled from balloons upon undefended places. That was nothing new, since the bombardment of undefended places had been already prohibited under the first Hague Conference, and the provision might possibly be interpreted to cover London, but would not cover Paris, Cologne, Berlin or most other European cities. Yet this dubious sheet of paper is all the protection that civilization has secured against the atrocity of helpless destruction from the air.

In

Already Sir Hiram Maxim has told us that, in association with M. Blériot, he intends devoting the years still remaining before he departs in peace to the construction of an ethereal warship, with suitable projectiles, for the devastation of men and cities. Al

ready the "Army and Navy Gazette" announces that Messrs. Ehrhardt have brought out a new gun for attacking airships from below. It is a high-velocity 9-pounder, is carried on a motor, with six men and 140 projectiles, at a speed of 35 miles an hour, and is mounted on a pivot that can be adjusted so as to be exactly vertical. So the wild game of mutual destruction continues. The offensive power advances, the defence advances to meet it. A projectile is hurled from heaven, another projectile is flung up to heaven against it, and there is no limit to man's insanity. Well might the Japanese diplomatist exclaim in his familiar protest:

For two thousand years we kept peace with the rest of the world, and were known to it but by the marvels of our delicate ethereal art, and the finely wrought productions of our ingenious handicrafts, and we were accounted barbarians! But from the day on which we made war on other nations and killed many thousands of our adversaries, you at once admit our claim to rank among civilized nations.

There, with brief irony, the whole absurdity is exposed, and the question now is whether the civilized nations are going to take one more step along that absurd and hideous road, or will at last draw back from the enormity before them. There is need of haste. Vested interests are arising, and we know what the power of vested interests in armaments may bring about. As Mr. Galsworthy says:

One determined joint effort and the air is saved. It is no more difficult now to agree to ban aerial warfare than it was to agree to prohibit the explosive bullet; no more unnatural than it was for boxers to agree not to hit below the belt. But every month that goes by will make it more difficult; and when a few millions have been spent on this new form of devilry it may already have become too late.

Peace is just now in the air. Is it not a special opportunity for a Conference, held at Weybridge, or The Hague, or in Italy, or wherever diplomatists prefer, to lay down a universal law that civilized men will never attempt to kill each other in or from the air as long as the world standeth? It would be

The Nation.

difficult, for such a law would mark the most astonishing advance that mankind had ever made in humanity and practical wisdom. But let us not despair. Mankind has often taken equally astonishing steps in folly and bloodshed.

A few weeks ago an old lady, refusing an extortionate demand from a woman whom she had helped to the utmost of her ability, said feebly: "Really, I don't know what the world is coming to!" "Then I'll tell you," said the disappointed applicant furiously. "Us is going to be you, and you'm going to be we!" Is this an exceptional state of feeling, a relic of more barbarous ages, or is it a "sign of the times," a revelation of deeprooted class hatred? Does class hatred exist to any serious extent? Is it greater or less than it was a hundred years ago? If greater, is it greater in the sense of being more widespread or more intense? Is it more felt or more expressed? Does expression relieve or intensify the feeling? Are the speeches which one hears and reads mere rhetorical fireworks which fizzle out harmlessly in the cool night air, or do they imply deliberate conviction which will lead to concerted action?

Class preference must always exist; it is as natural and, within due bounds, as morally useful to prefer one's own class as it is to prefer one's own children, parents, or country. People who profess to hold another class in higher estimation than their own, or maintain that they are "as much at home in the cottage as in the hall and manorhouse," are like those who pride themselves on their perfect knowledge of a language and cannot open their lips

without betraying to any educated man that they are foreigners born and bred. If such persons as they claim to be could exist, they would be in danger of resembling the Italianate Englishman of the well-known proverb; but to love and serve one's own class without hating or disserving any other is well within the powers of the human mind and conscience.

The rich speak of class hatred as if it were, and always had been, entirely one-sided in this land of freedom, but there are many traces of a hatred that they must at some time have felt for the poor. In the improving children's books of sixty or seventy years ago the sin of pride, in the form of galling and arrogant behavior to dependents and social inferiors, is much dwelt on. Like other savage traits, it lingered among children when it was a thing of the past with most adults, I can remember a few playfellows of my own, especially those brought up in the country, whose inborn unreasoning scorn and contempt for the poor were simply amazing, considering that there were no visible signs of these evil feelings in their parents and elders, and that any display of them was promptly crushed. Class hatred lingered in public schools, and could be traced commonly among boys long after it had become exceptional in girls.

Among the poor most of what is called class hatred arises from igno

rance on both sides, from loosely-held tradition, or from a more or less wellfounded sense of personal injury. Some degree of acquaintance must precede liking, but mere ignorance gives a tolerably firm foundation for dislike. One constantly hears working men and women say of a person, who is perhaps literally the only member of a distrusted class known to them, "Oh, he isn't like the rest of 'em, with no feeling for anyone but themselves;" or, "They say he's a hard man, and I was fool enough to believe it; but when at last I had to go to him, I found he's like myself-he can deal with anybody that's straightforward. He don't like shifty ways. No more don't I." Many people imagine that they are victims of class hatred when, in reality, they are hated for not conforming to the accepted standard of their class. Officials are not hated for doing their duty, even in a narrow and unintelligent manner, but for doing it with brusquerie and lack of consideration. Often my patients have returned home from some long-thought-of quest in such cheerful, contented mood that I have been astonished to learn that their mission had failed: "No, the gentleman said it couldn't be done: it was against the rules; but he said it hadn't ought to be. He spoke very nice, and he seemed quite put out about it." As the greatest official in England maintained, three hundred years ago, severity breeds fear, but roughness breeds hate.

There is a class hatred arising from bitter, mortifying personal experience. As manners soften, this source must diminish; but although there is less to resent, we must expect that it will be more resented because more vividly realized, and because the sense of personal dignity is more generally diffused. Mental injuries are self-renewing things of power, and when people are highly developed enough to feel them it must not be expected that they will

be as easily forgotten as purely physical injuries or accustomed hardships. A Russian revolutionary prince tells us in his memoirs how, on one occasion, in a passion of childish sympathy, he kissed the hand of an educated houseserf who had been cruelly and unjustly punished, and of the grief he felt when the man drew himself away, scornfully telling him, "You, too, will be like the rest when you grow up."

This would not have been the attitude of an African slave: it proved the man's height in the moral scale, not his depth. When the case was reversed. and the boy and his brother were in danger of receiving punishment as hasty and almost as brutal for a mere accident which had occurred in the course of their play, this man and the rest of the house-serfs subscribed what was to them a large sum, and secretly repaired the mischief. Another serf, first highly educated at his master's expense and then set to servile tasks which he performed unwillingly. was sent into the army, a sentence locally regarded as equal to and rather worse than death; the funeral service being actually performed before he left the village. He reached a very high official position, and years afterwards, when his master was wholly at his mercy, he voluntarily used his power to save him from social disgrace.

At the time of the French Revolution we find many perfect examples of class hatred; neither sex, nor age, nor extreme youth afforded protection from its rage. In proof of the comparative weakness of actually existing feelings, one need only take the generally indulgent attitude of the poor towards the children of the rich, towards the old and suffering among them, and their usually protective attitude towards all women.

Where virulent hatred exists, it is often out of all proportion to the alleged offences, and probably has more