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The horrors of war seem to have reached the vanishing point in our latest African campaign. The smallness of the English losses is appalling. I do not see the fun of fighting (i.e., of paying taxes) if all the spice and relish is to be taken out of the results. I want more blood for my money--hecatombs of corpses. Two men killed in a whole battle? Ridiculous! If I cannot have my war at my own doors, and hear the bands and the cannon I have paid for, I must at least have sensational battle-fields--Actiums and Waterloos and Marengos. What is the use of war if it does not even serve to reduce our surplus population? Soldiering was never so healthy an occupation as to-day; one fights only a few days a year at the utmost, and if the pay is poor, so is that of the scavenger and the engine-driver and the miner, and everybody else who does the dirty work of civilisation, and does it, too, without pomp and circumstance and brass bands and laureates.
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