Moral Results of the Franco-Prussian War.
THERE has been no stage, perhaps, of the struggle, not even its most bloody epochs, which supplies more pathetic proof of the horrors of war than the present moment, when even the conqueror is oppressed with the prospect of the suffering his own heavy hand may have to inflict, and when the more violent passions on both sides are beginning to be checked by a desire to see a conclusion to calamities so great and varied. For France herself, no human pen can adequately describe the mingled agonies and humiliation of her position. Her manufactures and commerce have actually come to an end. The exquisite productions of her genius have all given place to the necessities of war, and the production of weapons of destruction. Not a bale of silk is said to remain at Lyons, the whole stock having been sold at a loss. The great middle class, the shopkeepers, both in Paris and in the other great towns of the empire, are, for the present, absolutely ruined. Her most beautiful towns are torn and shattered with shot and shell. Her fields for the most part remain uncultivated, while her peasants either maintain a hopeless guerrilla warfare against an irresistible foe, or toil to make the roads along which the columns of their fatal enemy are to maintain their conquering march, or construct the batteries which are to reduce their fascinating capital into ruins. Many of her villages have been burned to the ground. Far and wide a desultory warfare fills the land with blood, and makes the atmosphere heavy with the roar of distant cannonades. The aggregate amount of misery, suffering, and death, endured at the present moment in France, is beyond all human computation, and its intensity is only limited by the limit mercifully existing in our human capacity to suffer. There is a point at which conscious agony ceases by the very excess of agony, and feeling is blunted for the moment by its very intensity, only to awaken afterward to the more sustained and prolonged anguish. Nor is the suffering all on one side. There can be no doubt that Germany is bleeding at every pore, more silently it may be, more imperceptibly, but none the less fatally. Only one little step better than defeat in war, is victory in war; and in such war as modern science wages, this is especially true. The whole economic life of Germany must be at a stand-still, for the enormous forces which have been with such wonderful organization poured into France, must have drained the land of all its best and most vigorous life. This is the worse, because the army of Germany is not composed of a distinct class as in France, but is taken from the plow and the factory, the counting-house and the shop. Of these great and gallant hosts, there is a gradual but constant waste. Everywhere through France where the German armies move, there is a loss of life more or less. The sword and disease are doing their fatal work alike. Without tents, without camp equipage, without adequate stores, without effective hospital provision, every step of the German army marks more or less every day a drain of strength. The circle of the Paris fortification extends for six and thirty miles, and the circumference of the ground occupied by the investing army, or rather the investing armies, must be very much greater. All around, at every post, every work, every picket, there is loss of life; and even a victorious engagement, now that the Paris Gardes Mobile have learned to fight, only serves to swell the fatal aggregate. In the future, a prospect still worse meets the view. Mr. Russell remarked the other day that when the bombardment opens, the Paris forts would probably make it hot work in the Prussian batteries. Thus, whether in the case of bombardment, or in the case of assault, there is a frightful loss of life to be faced, only less dreadful in the sufferings borne by the besiegers than in the suffering inflicted on the besieged. There is even worse than this behind. The loss of life, and the crushing of domestic hope and happiness consequent upon it, are not, after all, the worst calamities of war. These may after a while be forgotten, under the healing influence of time and the consolations of religion. Nor is it war’s worst disaster that it throws back national prosperity for long years and years, and tends to dry up the springs of national industry and wealth. The worst effects of war are its moral effects, and the evil habit of exasperated passion, and the mutual hatred which it leaves behind it. It barbarizes men and manners. It throws the progress of Christian civilization indefinitely back, casts its own blood-red shadow on the future,—and bequeaths a legacy of strife and revenge, wrath, and sullen exasperation.—London Record.