The War in Europe by New York Tribune

Publishing Committee · Rochester, N. Y. · Mar 28, 1854

The War in Europe.

By New York Tribune

THE die seems to be cast. The long repose of Europe and the generous consequences springing therefrom, will, in all probability, cease. For several centuries Europe has not enjoyed such a protracted peace, as from the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars to this time. The wars of Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary were carried on upon the outskirts of European civilization as concentrated in Germany, France and England. In these countries progress in the main was steadily onward. If liberal ideas failed to shape society to the extent of the wishes of ardent philanthropists, there was unquestionably a distinct advance in arts and humanities slowly through the centuries. But in regard to the war now bursting forth, according to present appearances, the end and object seem equally obscure as affecting civilization and progress—progress even viewed subject, as it has been, to temporary re-action. But the interests of the laboring and productive classes will surely be sacrificed in such a contest; and how is the war to be ended as regards balances of political power?

While economics have been applied to the arts of peace, they have not been wanting to the arts of destruction; if a railway carries civilians, it can equally carry soldiers; if steamboats bear business men and pleasure seekers, they can equally transport regiments and their arms. So, too, the same ingenuity that has made single saws and plows do the work of many saws and plows of former rude construction, has improved the arms of defense and destruction to an equal degree in their terrible machinery. The strategical movements of large bodies are also vastly facilitated over former operations in that way. The infantry does not carry on its back such heavy burdens as it once did, and moves with a rapidity unknown to the wars of the early part of this century. It is besides, armed with rifles reaching with deadly precision further than once the heavy ordnance could send its sixty times heavier balls. The field artillery, instead of being chained to the slow step of the foot soldier, is mounted on trains, rivalling the cavalry in speed, but not losing thereby steadiness and precision of aim. Conflagration and death are poured out with one shot in various ways and shapes: shells, bombs, incendiary rockets are now more destructively than ever, a part and parcel of the game.

On the sea, too, the means of ruin are immensely increased. Vessels running against winds and waves, with a rapidity deemed chimerical when Napoleon and the Institute pronounced Fulton a dreamer and a charlatan; vessels loaded, too, with arms uninvented during the revolutionary and imperial eras; with Paixhan guns hurling projectiles of immense size to immense distances, a single one of which is sufficient to destroy the largest man-of-war, or crush the rocks and walls of a fortress. All these refinements of a civilized epoch will now serve and support the dire action of savage-like hates betwixt colossal nations. The nation which can sacrifice most heaps of human bodies and inhuman gold will carry off the gory prize of triumph.

In the great battles of the first fifteen years of our century it was calculated that scarcely one single musket-shot in two hundred took effect. Even the fire of artillery was not more surely directed. Napoleon mentions battles in which the French ordnance fired one hundred thousand shots. In the present state of perfection in fire-arms of every kind, few shots in comparison with those lost in former years may be ineffectual. The mind is appalled at the waste of human life which will thus occur on sea and on land.

Not less mournful, however, will be the influence of a prolonged and general war on the state of society. Extermination and poverty materially, and man morally, will be brought back to rival the fiercest of brute creation, and the sparks of individuality and dignity which begin to warm the bosoms of the masses will be extinguished. All lofty aspirations will be suspended; for wars always impoverish the popular mind, and sink it into abject ignorance and servility, and their results are to create the vilest hero-worship in which stolid generations wallow, dead to the calls of elevated genius. Whole nations thus become the despised tools of individual pride and ambition, styled captain or sovereign—not that such a character is great, but that myriads of men are small. Wars, in fact, alone rear despots. Without them, all men would be free. Neither castes in Asia, nor serfs in Europe, nor native slaves in Africa, and their derivatives in America, could exist without wars. When huge Murder bares her arm and strikes down the strong men of a nation, the others, and chiefly the women, become slaves. The American savage, with whom war is the rule and peace the exception, treats woman as a slave; and the howl for annexation and war in the United States comes from among the masters of slaves.

In the big war upon which Europe now verges, we see havoc and tears and desolation; but its promises of popular wealth and self-reliance, and hence of liberty, where are they?—New York Tribune.