ing to Procopius, perished by the sword, famine and pestilence; and in the war of twenty years waged by Justinian against the barbarous hordes that poured into Italy, the Goths alone are supposed to have lost more than fifteen millions!

Look at two cases more. The army of Xerxes, according to Dr. Dick, "must have amounted to 5,283,320;" and, if the attendants were only onethird as great as common at the present day in Eastern countries, the sum total must have reached nearly six millions! Yet in one year this vast multitude was reduced to 300,000 fighting men; and of these only 3000 escaped destruction. During the thirteenth century arose Jenghiz-khan, and ravaged the heart of Asia. On the plains of Nessa, he shot 90,000 persons in cold blood. At the storming of Kharasm, he massacred 200,000, and sold 100,000 for slaves. In the district of Herat, he butchered 1,600,000, and in two cities with their dependencies, 1,760,000. During the last twentyseven years of his long reign, he is said to have massacred more than half a million every year; and in the first fourteen years, he is supposed by Chinese historians to have destroyed not less than eighteen millions; a sum total of 32,000,000 human beings sacrificed in forty-one years by a single hand on the Moloch shrine of war!

Do you ask, now, for an epitome of the havoc war has made of human life? In the Russian campaign there perished in less than six months nearly half a million of French alone, and perhaps as many more of their enemies. Napoleon's wars sacrificed full six millions, and all the wars consequent on the French Revolution, some nine or ten millions. The Spaniards are said to have destroyed in forty-two years more than twelve millions of American Indians. The wars in the time of Sesostris

cost 15,000,000 lives; those of Semiramis, Cyrus, and Alexander, 10,000,000 each; those of Alexander's successors, 20,000,000. Grecian wars sacrificed 15,000,000; Jewish wars, 25,000,000; the wars of the twelve Cæsars, 30,000,000 in all; the wars of the Romans before Julius Cæsar, 60,000,000; the wars of the Roman Empire, of the Saracens and the Turks, 60,000,000 each; the wars of the Reformation, 30,000,000; those of the Middle Ages, and the nine Crusades in two centuries, 40,000,000 each; those of the Tartars, 80,000,000; those of Africa, 100,000,000! "If we take into consideration," says the learned Dr. Dick, "the number not only of those who have fallen in battle, but of those who have perished through the natural consequences of war, it will not perhaps be overrating the destruction of human life, if we affirm, that onetenth of the human race has been destroyed by the ravages of war; and, according to this estimate, more than fourteen thousand millions of human beings have been slaughtered in war since the beginning of the world." Edmund Burke went still further, and reckoned the sum total of its ravages from the first, at no less than THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND MILLIONS!!

CHAPTER III.

PERSONAL SUFFERINGS FROM WAR.

SECTION I

GENERAL TREATMENT OF WARRIORS.

WAR begins its work of cruelty and outrage with its own agents. Think of the violence practised in procuring seamen and soldiers. Where the warspirit is predominant, they are forced into the army and navy at the pleasure of their rulers, and doomed to all the hardships, perils and sufferings of war, with little or no hope of release till death. Just imagine the process of manning a fleet or an army. In some countries, they call first for volunteers; yet most of these are obtained by false representations, or the use of intoxicating drinks. The beardless boy, the thriftless husband, the reckless, desperate adventurer, bereft of reason by the maddening bowl, are coaxed to the fatal pledge, and then hurried away from home and friends to the camp or the war-ship, and forced into the work of human butchery as the business of their life. Most commonly, however, the ranks of war are filled by some species of compulsion. In England press-gangs, in a time of war, prowl around every sea-port, to seize on any seaman, if not upon any landsman, they may chance to find, and drag him, handcuffed and manacled, on board some war-ship. Not a poor man in the British empire is safe from this species of outrageous oppression; and yet has the practice been continued for so many ages as now to form a part of

the common law of the land, and to be justified not only by popular leaders in Parliament, but by grave, upright judges, the brightest luminaries of English law, as indispensable to her war-system. On the continent of Europe, conscription is the usual process. Every monarch there claims the right to force into his service every well-formed man in his dominions; and so far did Frederic the Great carry this species of tyranny, that it became hazardous for any able-bodied man to travel in Prussia, and even some foreigners of distinction were dragged into his army without reparation or apology.

One mode of procuring seamen in the United States is called crimping. The crimp persuades the seaman by fine stories to ship, tells him he will have three months' advance, gets his name affixed to the articles, and, if he is what is called a green hand, induces him to go on board the ship for the purpose of just looking at her. While there, the crimp produces a certificate of his having entered at the rendezvous; and the poor fellow is not permitted again to go on shore. His decoyer then brings against him a bill amounting to nearly or quite the whole of his three months' advance. This result is generally reached through the intoxicating bowl, a vile decoction of rum and sugar, mixed sometimes with opium or some other drug, that produces a drunken sleep, and in that state the recruits are frequently carried on board.'

Do you know how soldiers are generally treated? They are subjected to the most iron-hearted despotism on earth; to a bondage far worse than that of a Turkish peasant, or a domestic slave. They are at the mercy of every superior, from the commanderin-chief down to the pettiest officer. They have little or no protection against hourly abuse, insult and violence, nor any adequate security for life

itself, against the lawless passions of officers seldom called to account in war for the worst treatment of soldiers. "It is generally understood," says a very competent witness, "that the word of a commanding officer is law. He can punish at will; his authority is well nigh absolute; for the process of redress for a common sailor, under any ordinary circumstances, by an appeal to a court-martial, would be so tardy and dubious, as hardly to be considered a qualification of the statement, that the system is one of unlimited despotism." "Desperation," says another, seems to be the parent of many of those acts of insubordination which expose soldiers to punishment; and this desperation is apparently induced by the severe restraints to which they are subjected, joined with the painful conviction, that their sufferings can end only with their lives. Of this we have fearful evidence in the fact, that one death out of every twenty in the cavalry regiments (English) is from suicide."

66

Look at the provisions usually made for warriors. Go to a camp or a fleet, and there see human life rotting in masses into the grave. When seized with sickness, there is little or no care taken of them; no mother, wife or sister near to tend their couch; no pillow of down to ease their. aching head; no escape from pinching cold, or scorching heat; no shelter from howling blasts, or drenching rains. Thus they "languish in tents, and ships, amid damps and putrefaction, pale, torpid, and spiritless; gasping and groaning unpitied among men rendered obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery, and are at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice or remembrance."

Glance, also, at their food, often provided by avaricious, unprincipled contractors with less care than a farmer ordinarily takes in feeding his swine!