admit the right of the victor to slay all prisoners taken in arms, but he thinks that if heathen they might be more wisely enslaved, and if Christian they ought to be only held to ransom. It was not till another century had gone by that the feeling of Europe was absolutely clear and definite about the matter, and that Montesquieu was able to say without reserve that 'slaughter of prisoners made after the heat of action is now condemned by every civilised nation.' 5 If one wishes to see clearly how far the new sentiments had travelled, let him compare the civil war of Cavalier and Roundhead with the war of Stephen and Matilda five centuries before, or even with the Wars of the Roses half-way between. He will find an almost complete absence of the earlier ferocity. Men make war with grave regret; it is not the aim and object of life, but a sad necessity reluctantly complied with. Non-combatants are as little as possible molested, and property is rarely destroyed in wantonness or in malice. In short, it is by comparison a war between gentlemen, and it has little trace of the mad frenzy for strife, and none at all of the fierce thirst for blood, that characterised the earlier times.

On the Continent the progress was somewhat slower; still, it went forward; and Niebuhr says that the devastation of the Palatinate by the troops of Louis the Fourteenth was the last instance of the old practice whereby the houses, crops, and every kind of property throughout a fertile province were burnt, and the inhabitants turned out as homeless wanderers. But, of course, the greatest contrast between the seventeenth century and the seventh is found in the growth of a huge civil population. Every man of the seventh century was trained to arms. He had to be so trained. It was his only chance of prospering, and thus it became his only pride. In the seventeenth century not one man in a dozen had been in any way trained to arms or taken part in warfare. Great bodies of men had learnt to live in absolute peacefulness among themselves; and this alone was a clear mark of a huge alteration in warlike sentiments effected in the intervening thousand years.

Now make the final transition to the England of our own time. For two and a half centuries her soil has been practically free from war; for a century and a half it has been absolutely free from it. Scotland and Ireland have been very nearly as long undisturbed by conflicts. It now appears that forty millions of people can live at absolute peace among themselves in a land where, ten centuries ago, our ancestors of the Heptarchy spent their whole lives in fighting each other, till, as Milton says in his history of those unlovely times, the tangle of feuds and wars, murders and devastations, became too sickening to be recorded. If we contrast the present habit of going unarmed and never dreaming of the need of arms, with the dire necessity of those days, when his weapons were a man's constant Esprit des Lois, xv. 2.

5

companions, we can see how far the race has travelled on the road to peace. So, if we wish to see how far it has travelled on the to way humanity, think with what gusto our ancestors slew the wounded on the field of battle, and then consider how the army surgeon-an invention of the last two centuries-cares for the wounded of the enemy, with almost as much solicitude as for his own.

When war in our time arises, the opposing forces are on a far grander scale than has ever been known in the world's history. And yet the total amount of warfare is immensely diminished. For war is now much rarer, and it is comparatively brief. In spite of all the ingenuity of our great weapons of destruction, the loss of life in Europe by war during the present century has not exceeded one per annum out of every ten thousand of the population. One in a hundred would be a very low estimate of similar deaths in the Europe of a thousand years ago; so that warfare is now less than onehundreth part as destructive as it was in the early Middle Ages.

And this change in our habits and passions and ambitions has arisen from certain radical changes in human nature. Ask the average man who passes up Fleet Street to throw a baby into the air and catch it on a spear. He is physically incapable of the cruelty. If he saw another person do it, his nerves would react with violent repulsion at the sight. But if you could touch his sympathies you would find him contributing his hard-earned money to save from starvation babes he had never seen, and never would be likely to see, by the banks of the Ganges or the Whang-ho. There is plenty left of the old temper, and sometimes its upheaval gives reminiscence of the past, but in the main a newer spirit prevails that is founded on nerve organisms at once more intelligent and more sympathetic.

Those, therefore, who dream that a reign of peace may, after all, be not so very far away, should find some comfort in noting that all the current of historic tendency is in favour of their dream. If they were striving against that current, their cause would be manifestly hopeless. But it bears them on towards their goal. And it is wise at times to reflect amid our efforts that, though man may dip his paddle and either help or thwart a little, it is the current itself that really settles the direction of progress. Beneath our busy efforts, that seem so great and fill so large a place in our interests, there are great, slow world-forces, which work out results on a far grander scale. While our ears are filled with the rumours of the streets, the babblement of papers, and the wrangles of politics, and while we think that these things make history, the true forces which mould our human destiny flow deep and silent beneath these eddies and that froth.

Among the giant forces which thus work in unobtrusive might, there is the growth of human sympathy, which-neither made nor marred by human effort-moves steadily forward from century to century. It is a natural process, through which brutal and unsym

pathetic strains by slow degrees are worked out, leaving the earth to be possessed by the sympathetic. If it were only the withdrawal of one per cent. at each generation, the change, being cumulative, would make itself strongly felt. See what breeders can do by persistent culling of their flocks. And a natural process culls the human race with equal efficiency. If the brutal fellow finds it hard to mate, and finds it hard to make his union permanent when mated, it is plain that his particular type will leave less than the average of offspring. If the unkind and unsympathetic parent loses more of his children than the average parent, then here again we have a culling process, and in the new generation the sympathetic type will be better represented than the unsympathetic. If the low and callous fellow gets himself hung, or thrust in prison for ten years at a time, he leaves the world to be peopled by better men than he. But-apart from the criminal classes-the quarrelsome, selfish, unsocial man, the generally undesirable citizen, has always, in spite of what cynics may say, a less chance of thriving and leaving grandchildren behind him than his honest, helpful, and kindly competitor.

And as with individuals, so with races; kindness and honesty make the best policy in the end. The clan whose members stand shoulder to shoulder in mutual trust and good-fellowship will prosper and multiply when the neighbouring clan, rent with jealousies and weakened with feuds, grows thin and inconsiderable, and in the end disappears. Great nations obey the same law. When Germans could forget the antipathies of forty fragments, and make an empire, strong with brotherly cohesion, the day of their greatness began to dawn. While that continues, they must prosper and multiply. The solid unanimity recently displayed in England makes the nation secure, and will help her to people the world with her race in far-off colonies, which have owed their existence in part to a strong paternal feeling. Want of sympathetic cohesion paralyses a people, and it grows feeble and dwindles among the nations.

A vast process of elimination is therefore going on, by means of which the world is given more and more into the possession of the sympathetic type. While we amuse ourselves, and argue and quarrel and threaten, this great but unobtrusive change is going forward. Marriages are made or fail to be made; children are reared or die out; citizens succeed or fail; nations expand or decay in such a fashion that, on the whole, the kindly dispositions tend ever, more and more, to prevail over the cruel.

And therefore, Tsar or no Tsar, wars are eventually doomed, and peace must come in its own good time. That will be when the military instincts, born in our bone and thrilling in our blood, shall have been diluted to such an extent that our intelligence can fully control them.

There is, of course, no reason why human ingenuity might not

do something to hasten the process. Men are not like the cattle, that take no interest in the alteration of their own character. We have souls in us, and aspirations, which might readily enough change the process from one of centuries to one of only generations.

It is wise, however, not to be too sanguine, for the share of man is small and the influence of Nature hugely preponderant. From the Teuton chief who massacred women for the delight he had in killing, to the British officers I met on their way home from the Soudan, there has been an interval of twelve hundred years, filled with a long, slow, beneficent process of elimination, that has raised the human character immensely. If it required another four hundred years to carry us to the abolition of war, we could scarcely regard the rate of progress as having diminished. And yet I believe that this rate is being quickened at every generation, for in our day the law of the survival of the more sympathetic is allowed a far clearer course.

At any rate, there is not the smallest reason for looking upon war as incurable. Every evil has in its day been so regarded, and many of the darkest features of the military spirit in medieval times were held to be inevitable. But they have been swept away by the swelling current of humanity; and we may rest in faith-or, better still, may work in faith-that the fate of war will be the same as that of cannibalism, and human sacrifices, and baronial wars, and the duel in England. For the ever-inflowing tide of sympathy will bear it away, and men will look back and wonder that ever such a thing could be. It is only a question of patient hopefulness, with as much of helpfulness as we can devise.

ALEXANDER SUTHERLAND.

THE THAMES AS A SALMON RIVER

MANY reasons have been given for the decay and extinction of the once flourishing Thames salmon fishery, among them the want of piety—or, at any rate, the want of pious reverence-on the part of the fishermen. In olden days the Abbot of St. Peter's, Westminster, claimed, and for centuries received, tithe of all the salmon caught within the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, from Yantlett Creek to the City stone at Staines. According to the legend, the Abbot's claim was based on the plea that when St. Peter consecrated the church named after him at Westminster he made a grant to the convent of the tithe of the salmon, and as the fishermen gradually left off making their accustomed offering so the salmon gradually disappeared from the Thames.

The recently established Thames Salmon Association should bear this in mind, and arrange to let the Abbot of St. Peter's, Westminster, have his due share of the salmon when they have re-stocked the Thames.

Coming down to later times, there is no difficulty in showing by reference to acts passed for the protection of Thames salmon, and from records of their presence and capture in the river, that from the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century the Thames salmon fishery was a very important one.

That invaluable mine of antiquarian lore, Notes and Queries, tells us that in the churchwarden's book of Wandsworth, under date 1580, is this entry: In this somer, the fysshers of Wandesworthe tooke betweene Monday and Saturday, seven score salmons in the same fishings, to the great honor of God.'

Izaak Walton, writing about the middle of the next century, refers to Thames salmon as being the best in the kingdom, and to the great plenty of samlets in the river about Windsor; he says the fish would return in much larger numbers from the sea but for the neglect of the wise statutes of Edward the First and Richard the Second against the erection of salmon weirs in the Thames. These erections were more in the nature of traps, placed probably in the arches of the bridges, than what we understand now by the word 'weir.' These salmon traps were called 'kidels,' and it is interesting as