FEW

NEW epochs in the world's history have seen events of a more stupendous magnitude accomplished within a brief period than those which we are witnessing, and have been witnessing, during the last three months. The sudden collapse of the Second French Empire, for twenty years the terror of half the world, and the substitution for it of a Third Republic; France engaged in a struggle for very life with Germany; German political unity morally, and all but politically, reconstituted; the final absorption by Italy of the temporal power of the Papacy, involving a momentous change in the relation of the second largest Church of Christendom towards civil society in general;-such is the record of a single quarter of the year 1870. Yet Europe looks on still as in a dream, seeming scarcely yet to comprehend the vastness of the spectacle which vitally affects every State, and I might almost say every household in her midst. Till quite recently, for any yet apparent purpose in any but the two combatant nations, beyond desultory efforts of private charity, or some poor piece of side-play like the Belgian treaty, the war might nearly as well have been that of those two doughty West African potentates, Fa-fa and Oleo-funebo. There has been indeed of late a sort of universal hum about mediation-the hum as of a parliament of mice discussing, sotto voce, who shall bell the cat. Every neutral wanted every other neutral to mediate ;

but-except the Dublin Town Council-no European power seemed inclined to take the initiative in doing so. And the mediation talked of was only one after the fashion of the benevolent by-stander at a street fight, who should pat the winning fighter on the shoulder, and ask him not to hit quite so hard: the answer to which kind of mediation is generally, and deservedly so, a blow between the eyes. Surely the mediation which consists in words and pattings on the back is only of use before the fight has begun; when it has, a resolute grip, supported, if not by the constable's truncheon, at least by a clenched fist, is your only mediator.

It seems, indeed, now certain that an armistice has been actually urged on both belligerents by England, backed by Austria, Italy, Spain-Russia, moreover, undertaking to act separately to the same effect. I would fain be mistaken, but I doubt the wisdom and efficacy of the step. Apart from the preliminary condition said to be insisted on by Prussia, that France should admit the principle of a cession of territory, the terms of an armistice seem to me almost as difficult to settle as those of a peace. To take one question only:-not to revictual Paris and the beleaguered French strongholds during the armistice, would give the main benefit of such an armistice to Germany; to revictual them would give it to France. Still less can I understand the alleged purpose of the armistice-viz., to allow of the election of a Constituent Assembly in France. How can a nation be called upon to elect a representative assembly, with one-third of its territory overrun by an invader? What freedom of election can exist under his sway, or simply in his presence? But if the votes of the invaded districts be not taken (and Prussia, it is said, expressly vetoes the voting of Alsace and Lorraine), how can the voice of the non-invaded districts do duty for that of the nation? The proposal for these elections, although originating with the Committee of Defence itself, seems to me one which cannot be pressed without unfairness to France, and to its present Government. It is as good as any other during the war, being obeyed virtually from the Pyrenees to the Vosges, from the Alps to the Atlantic. It is only weakened by having its title to treat thus solemnly called in question.

Hard, therefore, as it may seem to say so, I do not much care to see an armistice yet. An unwise armistice might rather delay than hasten a real peace. Yet I feel convinced that there never was a crisis which called more imperatively for European deliberation, for European action. Some of the grounds of this opinion I have already indicated, in a paper published in this Review last month. I said there that the war having been turned by German statesmen from a merely dynastic*

The purely dynastic character of the war on the French part has been strikingly brought out during the past month by the publication of the reports of the Prefects,

into a national one, avowedly now carried on for the purpose of territorial aggrandizement, the danger to which Europe was heretofore exposed from the Napoleonic régime was but displaced; that Europe must remain under arms, on guard against Prussianized Germany. But I expressed then my belief that Prussian politicians did not aim at the utter downfall of France, and would refrain from carrying matters to this extremity.

I can no longer express this hope. However Count Bismark may disclaim the purpose of reducing France to a second-rate power, the progress of German warfare tends but too palpably to her utter annihilation. If the Prussian campaign has been hitherto even more splendidly victorious than the one which was decided by Sadowa, the course of the war has been utterly different. Instead of a mere congeries of populations, Prussia has met with a nation; corrupted and debased indeed by twenty years of despotism; stupefied by the fall of its government; organized only for mechanic obedience, and not for life, and thereby unable to meet the crushing impact of a living force like that of Germany; with scarcely a chief whom it knows well enough to trust and follow heartily; having almost everything in the sphere of morality to learn-truth, duty, self-respect, faith; and yet a nation notwithstanding, pervaded with the profoundest sense of its own unity, ready for any sacrifice short of dismemberment; resisting everywhere unsuccessfully, but yet resisting; willing to obey any governors who will but fight on rather than give up a single department; governed by balloon, by carrierpigeon, when railways are broken up and telegraph wires cut asunder; in which the voice of party is, for the first time in its history, hushed almost utterly before the claims of the country, so that ex-Pontifical Zouaves fight side by side with Republicans or Orleanists, and a Cathelineau or a Charette follows the same flag with Garibaldi.* Now such a nation must be crushed to be conquered, all but annihilated, before it gives in. And this is what an inexorable logic is forcing the Germans on to. In twenty-three departments, we are told-more than one quarter of the whole numberthere has been no autumn corn sown. The richly cultivated environs of Paris are already reduced, by the showing of German correshowing clearly that the public sentiment of France was altogether pacific. It stands henceforth demonstrated, that France was forced into war by the selfish ambition of her ruler-or rather, by his selfish fears. The war was simply the last stroke for fortune of a desperate gambler, staking a nation's life on the chance of establishing his dynasty. * The proceedings of the ultras at Lyons, at Marseilles, in Paris, do not militate against the assertion in the text. The question between them and the Government is simply, who shall best defend the country. There is not a trace in the France of 1870 of an anti-national party, such as there was in 1794, in 1814-except indeed in the person and in the immediate following of the able, but corrupt soldier, who, after having long gloriously held Metz, seems now about to sell it to the enemy.

spondents themselves, to a desert. Every day proves that the German operations consist more and more of mere foraging. For very life Germany is engaged in eating up France; and Count Bismark announces to the world that when Paris is taken, two millions of Frenchmen must starve, for he cannot feed them, I said, in writing before, that the curse of the ages would rest upon Germany if she were allowed to fulfil the downfall of France-upon all other nations who should tamely stand by to see it consummated. I say now that that curse seems nigh at hand.

Nigh at hand, whatever be the immediate issue of the conflict. Every day seems to me to make that issue more doubtful. So long as France continues in her present temper time surely fights as well as works for her; and if so, then, through never mind how many reverses, time and France must conquer. For a country determined to resist, every defeat by an invader is a partial victory. In days like ours, when there can be no more migrations of whole peoples, as in the fourth and following centuries of the Christian era, there is a limit to the efforts of the most successful invader, a point beyond which victorious progress becomes more fatal than defeat. Let every remaining French fort, including those which defend Paris, resist only as stubbornly as Strasburg or Toul, and the conquest of France by the Germans is impossible: all they can achieve is her ruin. If I were to take the authority of a painfully partisan letter by Sir J. G. Tollemache Sinclair to the Times, Germany demands not only Alsace and Lorraine for herself, not only Northern France for Belgium, Savoy for Switzerland, Nice and Corsica for Italy, and half the French fleet, but £160,000,000 sterling of war indemnity besides. Where, good God! is France to get them, when some of the very richest and most industrious of her departments are thus torn away from the remnant of her wasted soil, of her decimated and exhausted people? Yet by this time Germany has hardly a choice between the ruin of France and her own. "Germany is being ground down by this war,"-it was said to me a few weeks ago by one who had but small incentive to sympathize with France, a German refugee from Paris, driven out after five years' stay. Think for a moment of what is meant by the calling out of the Landwehr, even though the call has as yet extended to but one-half the scale of liability by age, embracing only the men of from thirty-five to forty-five, and not those from forty-five to fifty-five. Think what it would be for our English households, if in every one the bread-winner in the prime of life, the young father in most cases, were called on to serve in a foreign country. Think of the paralysis of physical and intellectual production which such a tremendous draft on the vital energies of our country would occasion. Think even of the check upon the increase of population for the

future which it implies. No money compensation would ever requite such an effort; but imagine what it would be for the country if no such compensation could be realized-if the most precious blood of the country had at its own sole cost to be spilled on foreign battlefields, wasted in foreign bivouacs-and you will be able to measure the intensity of ferocious selfishness which now drives Germany to fight on, in order to stave off her own ruin by the ruin of France. On the other hand, France must almost of necessity ruin herself to conquer. She must make a desert in front of the enemy where he might make one only behind him. She must be prepared to destroy all that he may leave undestroyed for his own shelter. Every town, every house, every palace which he occupies becomes hostile territory, to be shelled, burned, wrecked. French shells must avenge the fall of Strasburg on St. Cloud. In fact, let this warfare continue, and the only question is whether both combatants will be ruined, or one only. Meanwhile the war becomes every day more ruthless, as well as ruinous; every day we neutrals even read with increasing callousness of villages set fire to, peasants shot or hanged, in retaliation for the waylaying of individual invaders, or for mere partisan resistance.

But

Now, if there be one conclusion of modern political economy which is proved to demonstration, it is that Peace, not War, is the general interest of all nations. The human race is in the most homely and practical sense, as well as in the highest spiritual one, a body with many members, in which, if one member suffer, all must suffer with it. The ruin of France, like the ruin of Germany, must be the most serious blow to other nations. Private interests may here and there be benefited; one competitor removed makes room for another. the balance to the world will be that of loss, not gain; so much actual produce annihilated; so much production rendered impossible for the future; and conversely, so many consumers killed, so many more ruined. I leave to statisticians to calculate the figures of these losses: they will be found appalling. The check given to trade throughout the world is but too visible. To take but one of the less obvious instances amongst ourselves:-I was informed by a newspaper proprietor that the outbreak of the war sent down at once enormously his advertisements, and he instanced the most influential of weekly papers as having suffered yet more severely. Almost everywhere our artisans are complaining of want of employment, Birmingham and its neighbourhood forming, with the mining districts, well nigh the solitary exception-not Sheffield, which, I was assured by one who must be considered an excellent authority (the Secretary of the Sheffield Association of Organized Trades) has scarcely any workmen engaged in the manufacture of warlike implements, and is suffering