The Millennium by James White

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 21, 1878

The Millennium.

By James White

The doctrine of the world's conversion is still held by men in high position without that evidence which is found in the Scriptures or in existing facts relative to the condition of men and nations. Long have we heard that this happy state of things was to be introduced by the nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks, meaning that our armies would be dismissed, then armies would be discharged to engage in agriculture. But the present aspect is most gloomy. The nineteenth century has been regarded as one of great progress. It is even asserted that the coming good time is near, and that the millennium is right upon us.

But let facts speak. The following, clipped from the Bible Banner, gives the stately figures of 200,000,000 of men lost in the wars of this very hundred years which is supposed to introduce the millennium. Read the following, under the caption of

WASTE OF HUMAN LIFE.

A French statistician has taken the trouble to make an elaborate estimate of the number of human beings killed in battle, or carried off by disease, during the wars of the nineteenth century—the century, as he grimly observes, of “progress, of science, and humanity.” The statistics deduced by the New York World from the paper of this statistician show that, notwithstanding the “general peace” which reigned between the “great powers,” with little or no interruption from the downfall of Napoleon, in 1815, to the Crimean war, in 1854, and it is literally true that civilized men have been fighting in one part of the world or another, without cessation, ever since this model century began. The great wars of the French Empire raged from 1801 to 1815, with secondary fighting during the same period in the New World between Spain and her colonies after 1809 and 1810, and between England and the United States in 1812. The war of Greek independence broke out in 1822, and the Legitimist invasion of Spain by France took place in 1823, leaving that country a legacy of merciless civil conflicts not yet worked out to their consummation. The Russo-Turkish war of 1828 followed, which ended, as Count Moltke puts it, “in bringing 20,000 Russians to Adrianople at the cost of 50,000 lives and a thousand millions of roubles.” After this came the French invasion of Algiers, the Franco-Belgic war against Holland, the bloody and resultless Polish insurrection, the wars between Mehemet Ali and the Sultan, the war of the Swiss Sonderbund, the American war with Mexico, the revolutionary outbreaks of 1843 all over the Continent, the desperate struggle between insurgent Italy and Austria, and the Hungarian war in which Nicholas of Russia so madly intervened to save the Austrian Empire, in order that they might decide the defeat of Russia six years afterwards. “The Crimean war, in 1854, shook to pieces the system of 1815. It was followed by the Indian mutiny, by the French expedition to Syria, by the Franco-Italian war of 1859, by the civil war in the United States, by the Anglo-French expedition to China, by the Danish war, by the allied war with Paraguay, by the French invasion of Mexico, by the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, by the Cuban insurrection, by the Franco-German war of 1870, and by the great Russo-Turkish war now waging.” The statistician who has undertaken to compute the losses in the way of human life alone inflicted upon our century by all these wars and conflicts (and the catalogue is by no means complete) sums them up, on the faith of the best official data, at 200,000,000 of men. In other words, “the science and energy of the nineteenth century have been so applied as to deprive civilization of the use and service of a number of able-bodied male human beings five times as large as the total population of these United States.” J. W.