Edwin Lawrence Godkin

Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 Edwin Lawrence Godkin

General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1895 Original Publisher: C. Scribner's sons Description: "The articles in this volume have appeared in the Nation during the last thirty years." Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CULTURE AND WAll The feeling of amazement with which the world is looking on at the Prussian campaigns comes not so much from the tremendous display of physical force they afford -- though there is in this something almost appalling -- as from the consciousness which everybody begins to have that to put such an engine of destruction as the German army into operation there must be behind it a new kind of motive power. It is easy enough for any government to put its whole male population under arms, or even to lead them on an emergency to the field. But that an army composed in the main of men suddenly taken from civil pursuits should fight and march, as the Prussian army is doing, with more than the efficiency of any veteran troops the world has yet seen, and that the. administrative machinery by which they are fed, armed, transported, doctored, shrived, and buried should go like clock-work on the enemy's soil, and that the people should submit not only without a murmur, but with enthusiasm, to sacrifices such as hpove never before been exacted of any nation except in the very throes of despair, show that something far more serious has taken place in Prussia than the transformation of the country into a camp. In other words, we are not witnessing simply a levy en masse, nor yet the mere maintenance of an immense force by a military monarchy, but the application to military affairs of the whole intelligence of a nation of great mental and moral culture. The peculiar...