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Show 136 I37 made up of rough barbarians untouched by Greek or Roman culture." "\\7hate\'cr the remote and ultimate cause may have been. the immediate cause to which the fall of the empire can be traced is a physical. not a moral, dc ' ln valor. discipline and science the Roman armies remained what they had always been and the peasant emperors of lllyricum were worthy successors of (fincins natus and Caius Marius. i0 lllll‘lllllVWW L "WI" hit the problem was, how to replenish those armies. Men were wanting. The empire perished for want of men." Does history ever repeat itself? It always does if it is true history, If it does not. we are dealing not with history but with mere succession of incidents, I.ike causes produce like effects, just as often as we may choose to test them. \thnever men use a nation for the test, poor seed yields a poor fruition. Where the weakling and the coward survives in human history. there "the human harvest is bad." and it can never be otherwise. Noblest of Roman provinces was Callia, the favored land, in which the best of the Romans, the Franks and the Northmcn have mingled their blood to produce a nation of men hopefully leaders in the arts of peace, fatally leaders also in the arts of war. Not long ago I visited the city of Novara. in northern Italy. There. just to the south of the town. in a wheat field, the farmers have plowed up skulls of men till they have piled up a pyramid ten or twelve feet high. Over this pyramid some one has built a canopy to keep off the rain. These were the skulls of young men of Savoy. Sardinia and Austria men of eighteen to thirtysfive years of age, without physical blemish so far as may be!peasants from the farms and workmen from the shops. who met at Novara to kill each other over a matter in which they had very little Coneern. Should Charles Albert, the l'rince of Savoy, sit on his unstable throne or must he yield it to some one else? This was the question. and this question the battle of Novara tried to decide. It matters not what this decision was. IIistory records it, as she does many matters of less moment. But this fact concerns us~ here in thou inds they died. Farther on. Frenchmen, Austrians and Italians fell together at Magenta in the same cause. You know the color that we call Magenta, the hue of the blood that flowed out under the olive trees. Solferinoaince that battlefield gave its name to scarlet ribbons, the hue of the blood that stained her orange groves. It was at Solferino that the Red Cross Society had its origin, in the sympathy for the sufferings of wounded men left for five days unaided on the field when they fell. Lodi, Ma- reng0¥all these names call up memories of idle carnage, of wasth life. Go over Italy as you will, there is scarcely a spot not criinsoned by the blood of France, scarcely a railway station without its pile of French skulls. You can trace them across to Iigypt, to the foot of the pyramids. You will find them in Germany at Ulm and "'21::rain, at Jena and Leipzig, at Liitzen and llautzen. at Ilohenlinden and at. Austerlitz. You will find them in Russia, at Moscow; in Belgium, at Waterloo. "A boy can stop a bullet as well as a man," said Napoleon. And with the rest are the skulls and bones of boys, "ere evening to be trodden like the eras: " "Born to be food for powder" was the grim epigram of the day, summingr up the life of the French peasant. Read the dreary record of the glory of France, the slaughter at \Vaterloo, the wretched failure of Moscow, the miserable deeds of Sedan, the waste of .\lgicrs, the poison of Ii'ladar‘ascar, the crimes of Indra-China, the, hideous results of harrack vice and its entail of disease and sterility, and you will understand the "Man of the lloe." The, man who is left, the man whom glory cannot use. becomes the father of the future men of France. As the lonuihorn aboriginal type reappears in a neglected or abused herd of h'gh-bred cattle. so comes forth the aboriginal man. the "Man of the llne," in a wasted race of men. In the loss of war we count not alone the man who falls or whose life is tainted with disease There is more than one in the man's life. The bullet that pierces his heart goes to the heart of at least one other. For each soldier has a sweetheart; and if she remain single for his sake, so far as the race is concerned, the one is lost as well as the other. Today we are told by Frenchmen that France is a decadent nation. This is a confession of judgment, not an accusation of hostile rivals. It does not mean that the slums of Paris arc, destructive of human life. That we know elsewhere. lCach great city has its great burdens, and these fall hard on those at the bot- tom of the layers of society, There is degradation in all great cities. but the great cities are not the whole of France. It does not mean |
