Practical English Composition: Book II by Edwin L. Miller (best books to read fiction .txt) 📕

A Voltairean view of war may be of interest at this time. Some one has called attention to the illuminating discourse between Micromegas, gigantic dweller on one of the planets revolving about Sirius, and a company of our philosophers, as reported in the seventh chapter of the amusing fantasy bearing the name of the above-mentioned Sirian visitor. A free translation of a part of this conversation is here offered. After congratulating his terrestrial hearers on being so small and adding that, with so manifest a subordination  of matter to mind, they must pass their lives in the pleasures of intellectual pursuits and mutual love—a veritable spiritual existence—the stranger is thus answered by one of the philosophers: “We have more matter than we need for the accomplishment of much evil, if evil comes from matter, and more mind than we need if evil comes from mind. Do you know that at the present moment there are a hundred thousand fools of our species, wearing caps, who are killing a hundred thousand other animals wearing turbans, or who are themselves being massacred by the latter, and that almost everywhere on earth this is the immemorial usage?” The Sirian, properly shocked, demands the reason of these horrible encounters between creatures so puny. “It is all about a pile of dirt no bigger than your heel,” is the reply. “Not that any one of these millions of men marching to slaughter has the slightest claim to this pile of dirt; the only question is whether it shall belong to a certain man known as Sultan or to another having the title of Czar. Neither of the two has ever seen or ever will see the patch of ground in dispute, and hardly a single one of these animals engaged in killing one another has ever seen the animal for whom they are thus employed.” Again the stranger expresses his horror, and declares he has half a mind to annihilate with a kick or two the whole batch of ridiculous assassins. “Don’t give yourself the trouble,” is the rejoinder; “they will accomplish their own destruction fast enough. Know that ten years hence not a hundredth part of these miserable wretches will be left alive; and know, too, that even if they were not to draw the sword, hunger, exhaustion, or intemperance would make an end of most of them. Besides, they are not the ones to punish, but rather those sedentary barbarians who, from the ease and security of their private apartments, and while their dinner is digesting, order the massacre of a million men, and then solemnly return thanks to God for the achievement.” The visitor from Sirius is moved with pity for a race of beings presenting such astonishing contrasts.—The Dial, January 1, 1915.9

Theodor Mommsen’s “Law of National Expansion,” in view of the present war, is interesting. In his History of Rome, which was published in 1857, he says in substance that a young nation which has both vigor and culture is sure to absorb older nations whose vigor is waning and younger nations whose civilization is undeveloped, just as an educated young man is sure to supplant an old man in his dotage and to get the better of a muscular ignoramus. That nations, as well as individuals, should do this is, in Mommsen’s opinion, not only inevitable but right.

In ancient times the Romans were the only people in whom were combined a superior political organization and a superior civilization. The result was that they subdued the Greek states of the East, which were ripe for destruction, and dispossessed the people of lower grades of culture in the West. The union of Italy was accomplished through the overthrow of the Samnite and Etruscan civilizations. The Roman Empire was built upon the ruins of countless secondary nationalities which had long before been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization. When Latium became too narrow for the Romans, they cured their political ills by conquering the rest of Italy. When Italy became too narrow, Cæsar crossed the Alps.

So far Mommsen. The conclusions drawn from his “law”  by some of his successors are ingenious. They amount to this: As Rome grew in power and culture, so Brandenburg, since the days of the Great Elector, has been expanding in spirit and in territory. That illustrious prince began by absorbing Prussia. Frederick the Great added Silesia and a slice of Poland. Wilhelm I obtained Schleswig, Holstein, Alsace, and Lorraine by war, and Saxony and Bavaria by benevolent assimilation. The present Kaiser has already acquired Belgium by the former and Austria by the latter process. Like the Rome of Cæsar, the German Empire is now at war on the one hand with decadent civilizations and on the other with a horde of barbarians. What Greece and Carthage were to Rome, France and England are to Germany, while Russia is the modern counterpart of the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the Commentaries. Such at least is what certain writers think the Germans think.

Cæsar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. Macaulay’s Frederick the Great. Southey’s Life of Nelson. Parkman’s The Conspiracy of Pontiac. Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe. Fiske’s The Mississippi Valley in the Civil War.