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Show CIVItilZ . D WAK. I The world to-day is being treated to : one of the strangest spectacles it, ha ever beheld. An exhibition of "civil iaed war" on the grandest scale occupies J the attention of all the nations of the j civilized or "enlightened" world. Napoleon Na-poleon and Kiug William, after lone preparation, have led hundreds c ! - thousands of men to the wildest slaugli-ter. slaugli-ter. They have brought to bear the greatest possible seieuce, skill, ability tnd power; for what? To destroy life, by "civilized'' warfare. They talk of explosive bullets as barbarous ! Yet they devastate a fair land, lay towns and cities in ruins, hurl thousands of jnen in heaps of mangled gore, and call it "civilized'' warfare! Is it auy wonder that men of enlightenment, of reflection and intellectuality, query concerning the world's progress in civilization civ-ilization and enlightenment? And these men are the world's rulers ru-lers and masters I Disguise it as we ! may, they rule humanity ; they dictate the terms on which the great people of the earth shall exist. This .man, Napoleon, Na-poleon, and this other man, King Williaji, have had the power to plunge n;irly eighty millions of men and . women into deadly strife, to take the best and bravest, the strongest and wisest, from the peaceful pursuits of 'life, and embroil them in deadly conflict con-flict ; and this they call "civilised war!" Prussia Is to-day, perhaps, the best educated nation on the earth ; France lead in fashion, and claims to lead in art and science. Thee two countries, presenting' the spectacle of claiming to lead the world in letters and manners, throw themselves against etich other in the deadliest conflict, itir up the worst passions of the European Euro-pean continent, mike the earth fat with thousands of corpses, water it '..with the blood-red rain of scores of battle-fields, leave thousands and hundreds hun-dreds of thousands of widows, with orphans or-phans whose fathers fill whole heca-' heca-' tombs of ghastly graves ; this they call "civilized warfare !" Is it any wonder we think their claims to civilization, refinement and enlightenment would , bear investigation? That they give good reason for supposing their claims to , civilization are not so far in advance of those put forth by the rude barbarians barba-rians of the western wild-, the result of whose "savage" warfare is limited when compared with the evils with which crowned, monarchs affiict a continent con-tinent in conducting their "civilized warfare !" |
