What Is Wrong with Civilization?
How can it be that the Government of a civilized State commits, or
permits in its agents, such barbarities? The fundamental reason seems to
be that most of the European nations still believe that national
greatness depends on the possession and brutal use of force, and is to
be maintained and magnified only by military and naval power.
In North America there are two large communities--heretofore inspired
chiefly by ideals of English origin--which have never maintained
conscripted armies, and have never fortified against each other their
long frontier--Canada and the United States. Both may fairly be called
great peoples even now; and both give ample promise for the future.
Neither of these peoples lacks the "stout and warlike" quality of which
Sir Francis Bacon spoke; both have often exhibited it. The United States
suffered for four years from a civil war, characterized by determined
fighting, in indecisive battles, in which the losses, in proportion to
the number of men engaged, were often much heavier than any thus far
reported from the present battlefields in Belgium and France.
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