Omega, Camille Flammarion [top 10 books to read TXT] 📗

5 to 60 millions; which, for the total population of the globe, gives an increase of 2,010 millions. And this increase had continued, with some fluctuations.

Language had become transformed. The never-ceasing progress of science and industry had created a large number of new words, generally of Greek derivation. At the same time, the English language had spread over the entire world. From the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth centuries, the spoken language of Europe was based upon a mixture of English, of French, and of Greek derivatives. Every effort to create artificially a new universal language had failed.

Long before the twenty-fifth century, war had disappeared, and it became difficult to conceive how a race which pretended to knowledge and reason could have endured so long the yoke of clever rascals who lived at its expense. In vain had later sovereigns proclaimed, in high-sounding words, that war was a divine institution; that it was the natural result of the struggle for existence; that it constituted the noblest of professions; that patriotism was the chief of virtues. In vain were battlefields called fields of honor; in vain were the statues of the victors erected in the most populous cities. It was, at last, observed that, with the exception of certain ants, no animal species had set an example of such boundless folly as the human race; that the struggle for life did not consist in slaughtering one another, but in the conquest of nature; that all the resources of humanity were absolutely wasted in the bottomless gulf of standing armies; and that the mere obligation of military service, as formulated by law, was an encroachment upon human liberty, so serious that, under the guise of honor, slavery had been reestablished.

Men perceived that the military system meant the maintenance of an army of parasites and idlers, yielding a passive obedience to the orders of diplomats, who were simply speculating upon human credulity. In early times, war had been carried on between villages, for the advantage and glory of chieftains, and this kind of petty warfare still prevailed in the nineteenth century, between the villages of central Africa, where even young men and women, persuaded of their slavery, were seen, at certain times, to present themselves voluntarily at the places where they were to be sacrificed. Reason having, at last, begun to prevail, men had then formed themselves into provinces, and a warfare between provinces arose⁠—Athens contending with Sparta, Rome with Carthage, Paris with Dijon; and history had celebrated the glorious wars of the Duke of Burgundy against the king of France, of the Normans against the Parisians, of the Belgians against the Flemish, of the Saxons against the Bavarians, of the Venetians against the Florentines, etc., etc. Later, nations had been formed, thus doing away with provincial flags and boundaries; but men continued to teach their children to hate their neighbors, and citizens were accoutred for the sole purpose of mutual extermination. Interminable wars arose, wars ceaselessly renewed, between France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Russia, Turkey, etc. The development of weapons of destruction had kept pace with the progress of chemistry, mechanics, aeronautics, and most of the other sciences, and theorists were to be found, especially among statesmen, who declared that war was the necessary condition of progress, forgetting that it was only the sorry heritage of barbarism, and that the majority of those who have contributed to the progress of science and industry, electricity, physics, mechanics, etc., have all been the most pacific of men. Statistics had proved that war regularly claimed forty million victims per century, 1,100 per day, without truce or intermission, and had made 1,200 million corpses in three thousand years. It was not surprising that nations had been exhausted and ruined, since in the nineteenth century alone they had expended, to this end, the sum of 700,000 million francs. These divisions, appealing to patriotic sentiments skillfully kept alive by politicians who lived upon them, long prevented Europe from imitating the example of America in the suppression of its armies, which consumed all its vital forces and wasted yearly more than ten thousand million francs of the resources acquired at such sacrifice by the laborer, and from forming a United States of Europe. But though man could not make up his mind to do away with the tinsel of national vanity, woman came to his rescue.

Under the inspiration of a woman of spirit, a league was formed of the mothers of Europe, for the purpose of educating their children, especially their daughters, to a horror of the barbarities of war. The folly of men, the frivolity of the pretexts which arrayed nations against each other, the knavery of statesmen who moved heaven and earth to excite patriotism and blind the eyes of peoples; the absolute uselessness of the wars of the past and of that European equilibrium which was always disturbed and never established; the ruin of nations; fields of battle strewn with the dead and the mangled, who, an hour before, lived joyously in the bountiful sun of nature; widows and orphans⁠—in short, all the misery of war was forced upon the mind, by conversation, recital and reading. In a single generation, this rational education had freed the young from this remnant of animalism, and inculcated a sentiment of profound horror for all which recalled the barbarism of other days. Still, governments refused to disarm, and the war budget was voted from year to year. It was then that the young girls resolved never to marry a man who had borne arms; and they kept their vow.

The early years of this league were trying ones, even for the young girls: for the choice of more than one fell upon some fine-looking officer, and, but for the universal reprobation, her heart might have yielded. There were, it is true, some desertions; but, as those who formed these marriages were, from the outset, despised and ostracized by society, they were not numerous. Public opinion was formed, and it