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must turn away for ever from the primrose path of youth into the via media. But who will not cheerfully accept such a correction? Who will regret that the shadow of his days should run backward for how short a span soever, or grudge to find another turn of the glass to his credit before the striking of the inevitable hour? The feet of such a messenger of good tidings are indeed beautiful upon the mountains; his voice is as the voice of the blessed bird of spring, which brought back to the listening poet the golden time of his vanished youth.

Of all these old wisdoms thus recalled to our memory, perhaps none is wiser than Bacon's, "Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still, for age will not be defied". Half the secret of life, we are persuaded, is to know when we are grown old; and it is the half most hardly learned. It is more hardly learned, moreover, in the

matter of exercise than in the matter of diet. There is no advice so commonly given to the ailing man of middle age as the advice to take more exercise, and there is perhaps none which leads him into so many pitfalls. This is particularly the case with the brain-workers. The man who labours his brain must spare his body. He cannot burn the candle at both ends, and the attempt to do so will almost inevitably result in his lighting it in the middle to boot; the waste of tissue will be so great that he will be tempted to repair it by the use of a too generous diet. Most men who use their brains much soon learn for themselves that the sense of physical exaltation, the glow of exuberant health which comes from a body strung to its full powers by continuous and severe exercise is not favourable to study. The exercise such men need is the exercise that rests, not that which tires. They need to wash their brains with the fresh air of heaven, to bring into gentle play the muscles that have been lying idle while the head

worked. Nor is it only to this class of labouring humanity that the advice to take exercise needs reservations. The time of violent delights soon passes, and the efforts to protract it beyond its natural span is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. Some men, through nature or the accident of fortune will of course be able to keep touch of it longer than others; but when once the touch has been lost the struggle to regain it can add but sorrow to the labour. Of this our doctor makes a cardinal point; but pertinent as his warning may be to the old, for whom indeed he has primarily compounded his elixir vitæ, it is yet more pertinent to men of middle age, and probably it is more necessary. It is in the latter period that most of the mischief is done. The old are commonly resigned to their lot; but few men will consent without a struggle to own that they are no longer young.

Most

And specially is this friend of man to be thanked for his warning against that most pestilential of modern here sies, the bicycle or tricycle, or whatsoever its accursed name may be. Elderly men, he says, should eschew this unnatural mode of progression. cordially we hope that the warning is superfluous. The spectacle of an old man, writhing in the ungainly contortions necessary to the proper management of this "agonizing wheel ", were indeed one to make angels weep. We have ourselves no great passion for seeing even the young take their exercise in this fashion. They had far better trust to their own legs, if a horse is beyond their means. doubt they can cover more ground that way, and to do the most possible in the shortest possible space of time appears to be one of the necessities of the age. But we are well persuaded that the country-walk that was found good enough for our fathers will serve their sons' turn better than this insane careering over hill and dale. The former refreshed mind as well as body; but what of all the pleasant sights and sounds of our fair English

No

landscape do these young Titans enjoy, as they go staggering on,

With deaf

Ears and labour-dimmed eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left?

There is one point we are surprised to find our friend leaving untouched. Perhaps he considers it included in the warning that no hard and fast rules for diet can be laid down; but he might have done well to be a little more explicit. We allude to the necessity for frequent changes of diet. All things are not good to all men, and all things are not always good to the same man. This was a point a point much insisted on by the wise minds of old. Bacon especially commends the advice of Celsus (whom he somewhat sarcastically observes must have been a wise man as well as a good physician) that " one of the great precepts of health and lasting" is "that a man do vary and interchange contraries". The man who confines his studies within one unchanging groove, will hardly find his intellectual condition so light and nimble, so free of play, so capable of giving and receiving, as he who varies them according to his mood, for the mind needs rest and recreation no less than the body; it is not well to keep either always at high pressure. One fixed, unswerving system of diet, without regard to needs. and seasons, or even to fancy, is not wise. One man has not always the same stomach, any more than all men have the same stomach. What is grateful and nourishing at one time may be found insipid and even unwholesome at another. Within the lines

marked by experience it is well that the love of change which is natural to all men should be given full play. A too servile adherence to a system which has been found once beneficial in certain conditions may diminish or even destroy its value when those conditions return. The great secret of existence after all is to be the master and not the slave of both mind and body, and that is best done by giving both free rein within certain limits which, as the old sages were universally agreed, each man must discover for himself. Happy are the words of Addison and happily quoted: "A continual anxiety for life vitiates all the relishes of it, and casts a gloom over the whole face of nature, as it is impossible that we should take delight in anything that we are every moment methods of avoiding that pitiful afraid of losing". One of the best anxiety-that bloodthirsty clinging to life which is after all perhaps not confined to the English middle-class—is to learn within what limits we may safely indulge our desire for change, and then freely indulge it within them. “Oh, sweet Fancy", sang the poet,

Oh, sweet Fancy! let her loose;
Everything is spoilt by use:
Where's the cheek that doth not fade,
Too much gazed at? Where's the maid
Whose life mature is ever new?
Where's the eye however blue,
Doth not weary? Where's the face
One would meet in every place?
Where's the voice, however soft,
One would hear so very oft?

And so we end as we began, by setting Digestion in the place of Love!

PROGRESS AND WAR.

WAR estimates increase and even in sea-girt England conscription, or something like it, is proposed. With all our enlightenment, philanthropy and democracy, after William Penn, Cowper, and Wilberforce, after Voltaire and Rousseau, after Jeremy Bentham, the Manchester School and John Bright, and alas! after nearly nineteen centuries of Christianity, we have war, still war, apparently on a larger scale than ever, taking away millions from the plough, devouring the harvests of industry, threatening again to fill the world with blood and havoc. The only question is through which of several craters, the FrancoGerman, the Panslavic, the AngloRussian, or the Austrian, the eruption will break out and the lava-torrent flow.

To the despairing secretaries of peace-societies, by an address from one of whom the present paper has been suggested, it seems as if, in the substitution of reason for the sword, no advance had been made. This is not so. In the first place war instead of being normal has among civilized nations become occasional. The Assyrian or the Persian conqueror made war as a matter of course, and spent his summer in campaigning with his mighty men of valour as regularly as the servile portion of his population spent it in gathering in the harvest. So did Timour and Genghis Khan. So did the heirs of Mahomet while their vigour lasted. So did the feudal lords, in whose lives the excitement of war was varied only by the excitement of the chase. So, it may almost be said, did the little city-republics of Italy, though these learned in time to do their fighting with mercenaries. But now war is an extraordinary occurrence; there must be a casus belli,

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and diplomacy must have been tried and failed. We have had long spells of peace. Between the Napoleonic War and the Crimean War there was so long a spell of peace that the world began to think that the hounds of war would never slip the leash again.

In the second place the sentiment for peace grows. Charles the Fifth told a soldier impatient for war that he liked peace as little as the soldier himself, though policy forced him to keep the sword in the sheath at that time. Even in Chatham's day a minister could avow that he was "a lover of honourable war." Palmerston, though he felt like Chatham, would hardly have dared to use the same language. Burke was as philanthropic as any statesman of his day, yet he seemed to regard as an unmixed blessing national success in war.

The

In the third place fighting, whereas it used to be every man's duty and half of every man's character, at least among freemen, is now a special tradeThe Servian constitution was a polity combined with a muster-roll. political upper class in Greece and Rome was the cavalry. The ridiculous ceremony of touching a turtlefed mayor or an old professor of science with a sword and bidding him rise up a knight reminds us that all honour was once military, and that saving in the Church there was no other high career. Conscription may be said to be a relapse into the old state of things. A relapse it is; but it is felt to be exceptional and the offspring of the present tension, while England still holds out against it, and America, even in the desperate crisis of the Civil War, resorted to it only in the qualified form of a draft with liberty of buying a substitute.

In Europe the present spasm of militarism may be said to be in some measure not occasional only, but accidental. With all our historical philosophy and our general laws, there are still such things as accidents in history. There are at least events which turn the scale, and which we cannot distinguish from accidents. Had Gustavus Adolphus lived it is a moral certainty that he would have continued to conquer, and that the whole of Germany would have been wrested from Austria and Rome; but a wreath of mist floats over the battlefield of Lutzen: Gustavus is separated from his men and falls, and half Germany remains Austrian and Roman. Disease carries off Cromwell before he had begun to decay, and when a few years more of him would have founded a Commonwealth, or more probably a Protestant and Constitutional dynasty, and torn all that followed from the book of fate. This system of vast standing armies, and the prevalence of the military spirit, are largely the offspring of the great wars caused by the military ambition of Napoleon, as the political convulsions of the last half century have been in no small measure the results of the struggle of the nations against him for their independence, which for the time produced a violent reaction in favour of the native dynasties. But Napoleon as a master of French legions was an accident. France swallowed Corsica in the year of his birth, and, like Eve when she swallowed the apple, "knew not eating death." Corsica was an island peopled of old by exiles and outlaws, an island of savagery, brigandage, and vendettas, out of the pale of moral civilization. Napoleon was an incomparable general, and a great administrator of the imperial and bureaucratic kind; but in character he was a Corsican, and as completely outside moral civilization as any brigand of his isle. He had several thousand Turkish prisoners led out and butchered in cold blood simply to get rid of them; he poisoned his own

sick for the same purpose. Never did the most hideous carnage, or the worst horrors of war, draw from him a word of pity or compunction, while Marlborough, hard-hearted as he was, after witnessing the slaughter of Malplaquet, prayed that he might never be in another battle. Lord Russell saw Napoleon at Elba, and he used to say that there was something very evil in Napoleon's eye, and that it flashed when his visitor spoke to him of the excitement of war. In other things this man was equally a moral savage. His passions were under no restraint of decency. He took a lady, as M. Taine tells us, from the dinner-table to his bedroom. When Volney said something which displeased him, he gave him a kick which laid him up for days. For truth and honour he had no more regard than a Carib. A Corsican lust of war and rapine was and remained at the bottom of his character. Master of France and her armies this arch-bandit, by his personal barbarism, prolonged a series of wars which otherwise would have closed with the subsidence of the Revolution and the repulse of the allies. It is true that a policy of glory was up to a certain point adapted to the military vanity of France. But Madame de Rémusat tells us, in her Memoirs, that the heart of France went out no longer with the armies after Friedland; and in 1814 Napoleon, on his way to Elba, was afraid to pass through the South of France because the people would have torn him to pieces.

Some causes of war, so far as the civilized world is concerned, are numbered with the past. We shall have no more wars for sheer plunder or rapine, like those of primeval tribes. We shall have no more migratory invasions, like those of the Goths and Vandals, the Tartars and the Avars. Setting aside Napoleon, we can hardly be said to have had of late wars of mere territorial aggrandizement. The British empire in India has grown by successive collisions with barbarous neighbours and in wars generally

defensive, the most notable exception being the conquest of Scinde, which was greatly condemned on that account; and the Russian empire in Asia may be said to have grown mainly in the same manner, though Russia, as the most barbarous power, is still the most given to plunder. Next to Russia in barbarism comes France, in spite of her veneer, and the attempt to seize the Rhine Provinces was an act of uncivilized rapine qualified only by the fancy that the Rhine was her natural frontier. Religious wars we have not religion enough left to renew ; though the fact perhaps is that they were in reality less wars of religion than wars of Churchmen in defence of bloated Church Establishments which were attacked by those who attacked the faith. "That new and pestilent sect which assails all sacraments and all the possessions of the Church", is the description given of Lollardism in the old Statutes of Lincoln College by the two bishops who founded the college for its repression. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum has been chanted a little too often. All that murderous zeal would scarcely have been displayed if there had been no Archbishopric of Toledo.

On the other hand, as in the medical region while old plagues die out new plagues appear, we have now a rising crop of wars of national sentiment, produced by the passion for restoring ancient and half-obliterated lines of nationality or race, awakened largely by historical research, which has thus strangely become the procuress of ambition and war. The seeds of historic fancy sown by such writers as Thierry are springing up armed men, while the United Kingdom is distracted by antiquarian demagogism which seeks to restore the map of the twelfth century. The most formidable of these movements is Panslavism, in which the race-passion is allied with the military barbarism of Russia and with the tendency of the agonized Czar to divert Nihilism into the channel of aggrandizement. Among the most

terrible wars of the Middle Ages were social and agrarian wars, such as the rising of Wat Tyler and the Jacquerie. With some of these religion was wildly mingled. Religion mingles with social and agrarian war no longer, but of wars purely social and agrarian we can by no means feel sure that we have seen the end. All the world is heaving more or less with the subterranean fires which broke through the crust at Paris and Cartagena. Where we have not yet social or agrarian war we have dynamiters, moonlighters, and anarchist uprisings like that at Chicago. To mere hunger, which was the source of peasant revolt in the Middle Ages, is now added socialistic aspiration working in the half-educated breast, while the beliefs in the providential order of society and in a future compensation for those whose lot is hard here have lost their restraining force. Property will hardly allow itself to be plundered without fighting, and a conflict of classes may possibly ensue not less savage than the Jacquerie or the Peasant War. In that case the trained soldier is likely to find abundant employment in the service of armed repression if not on more glorious fields. Whether we have got rid of the commercial wars, of which the last century was full, must depend on the progress of Free Trade. To a war such as that which has been going on in Egypt it is not easy to assign a place in the catalogue. Our enemies say that it is a bondholders' war. We say that it is a war partly for the security of one of the world's great commercial highways, partly for the advancement of civilization and its protection against the barbarous Arab. In either case it is exceptional, and can hardly be said to denote a revival of the military spirit or to cloud the outlook of the secretary of the PeaceSociety for the future.

Why has not Christianity put an end to war? Why has it not put an end to government and police? If the words of Christ were fully kept there

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