[5] _Contemporary Review_, 1878.




V


IS WAR DIMINISHING?

The cheerful optimism of those pacifists who looked for the speedy
extinction of war has lately aroused much scorn. There really seem to
have been people who believed that new virtues of loving-kindness are
springing up in the human breast to bring about the universal reign of
peace spontaneously, while we all still continued to cultivate our old
vices of international greed, suspicion, and jealousy. Dr. Frederick
Adams Woods, in the challenging and stimulating study of the prevalence
of war in Europe from 1450 to the present day which he has lately
written in conjunction with Mr. Alexander Baltzly, easily throws
contempt upon such pacifists. All their beautiful arguments, he tells
us in effect, count for nothing. War is to-day raging more furiously
than ever in the world, and it is even doubtful whether it is
diminishing. That is the subject of the book Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly
have written: _Is War Diminishing?_

The method adopted by these authors is to count up the years of war
since 1450 for each of the eleven chief nations of Europe possessing an
ancient history, and to represent the results by the aid of charts.
These charts show that certainly there has been a great falling off in
war during the period in question. Wars, as there presented to us, seem