WAR

In the first place, it utterly disorganizes commerce while it lasts; it causes immense waste of human life as well as of property, which reacts on commerce afterwards it generally involves even in time of peace a conscription,; which withdraws fora time all able-bodied men from their work it always involves very heavy taxes, which are a grievous; burden on the labour of the country it leads to all sorts of absurdities, such as difference; of railway gauge in different countries and the artificial check of walls and fortifications on the natural expansion of cities. From the moral point of view, war is often a beneficent scourge. wars of the past, the characteristic which strikes us first and most forcibly is the difference in their length and duration. The time spent by the Greeks before Troy, the prolonged campaigns of the Crusades, and, coming to later times, the “ Wars of the Roses,” the “ Seven Years' War,” and even the Peninsular War, were measured by years and not by months or weeks, as is the case in wars of modern times. The Franco-Pru ian, the Ru o-Turk, the Japan-China wars were all over and decided in a space of time which would hardly have sufficed for the preliminary skirmishes of war—that a war in the Middle Ages. And the