Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre
is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as
cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry
emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong
ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers
of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex
industrial society, without direct experience of warfare save in this
mitigated form, have their characters wrought upon in a way that is
distinctively modern, as they become more and more disinclined to
violence and cruelty. European historians have noticed, with words
of praise, the freedom from bloodthirstiness which characterizes the
American people. Mr. Lecky has more than once remarked upon this humane
temperament which is so characteristic of our peaceful civilization, and
which sometimes, indeed, shows the defects of its excellence and tends
to weaken society by making it difficult to inflict due punishment upon
the vilest criminals. In respect of this humanity the American of the
nineteenth century has without doubt improved very considerably upon his
forefathers of the seventeenth. The England of Cromwell and Milton
was not, indeed, a land of hard-hearted people as compared with their
contemporaries.
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