The New York herald. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1840-1920, 1870-07-28

press Eugenie is named Regent of France.
The matter Of the secret treaty engaged a
large share of public attention, the British
press using the opportunity Of its publication
to warn Belgium Of probable coming danger.
The European crisis thus remains, as will be
seen, anxiously fevered and without any ap-
pearance of an immediate solution.
The Peoples Of Europe and the Great War.
To and fro the tide Of opinion sways, from
side to side, in reference to the right and the
strength of this Power or of that In the terri
BILE conflict which threatens to cover Christen-
dom with blood and ashes. The number of the
armies is counted, the array of fleets is given
in elaborate detail, and the ability Of the
leaders and the captains is extolled in endless
articles. France, Prussia, England, Russia,
Italy, &c., are mentioned confidently as uudi-
vided units of strength. But as yet no one
In the press of Europe or America has be-
thought him, or at least has expressed the
thought, that there may somewhere be-
meath the surface reside vast, silent,
suffering multitude Of men to whom
the marching and countermarching Of
these hosts mean ruin, misery and death.
What has the individual in either nation
the poor working man or peasant who lives
and tolls beyond the dividing frontierp He
is brother in poverty, and in OPP
preston, perhaps, with the conscript
who is suddenly called from bis humble
hearth to face bayonet and bullet for
cause he does not comprehend and
to the benefit of men who have been the
masters of him and of his kindred before him
for hundreds of years. Peace is the gospel of
civilization and progress, and war is the doc
trine Of every violence and every vice. A
century ago this was not comprehended, but
to-day of the one hundred and fifty millions
of human beings who people Europe the
vast majority, in accepting the general
truths of the religion of Christ and
receiving the rudiments of knowledge,
have learned to look upward for higher
glory than to manure the soil for the ambitious
satisfaction Of prince, and to nobler end
of life than the memory of wounds and
slaughter received by their comrades or
inflicted upon their antagonists.
This is the idea that pervades the work
ing masses-the true bone and sinew-
of Europe. Emperors and kings issue
pompous orders from their palaces
and bodies of armed soldiery advance
to the field of death; but the million
the mass of suffering, toiling men-remember
that on the East and on the West they have
only brethren laboring and praying like them
selves This is the inner tone that we begin
to discover already in the great diapason of
war that sounds in our ears from beyond
the Atlantic. At Strasburg, at Cologne,
at Geneva in Switzerland, at Florence
and Milan in Italy, the popular party,
as contradistinguished from the Court and
the army, has spoken. When, as early as
1861, M. Romieu predicted the coming Of the
cred Spectre" he feared the terrific outburst
of revolutionary passion that then threatened
to overthrow all forms of order in Europe
But the rise of Napoleon ILL., and his military
government conjured the ghost and laid it
with the welcome formula, 'The empire is
peace" Peace alone was the safety, and
only with peace could the old systems hope
for any lingering permanencs. But now it
has been shown by war after war, eliminating
at last in catastrophe that has no better pre-
text than the succession to discarded crown
in a country of but third or fourth rate i'm
portance in the world that while the
monarchical system endures and standing
armies are tolerated there is no guarantee
against sudden deluge of blood. The only
rainbow in the sky to the nations of the earth
is seen in the colors of the republic, one and
universal. This is mighty lesson, and at the
hour while we write the peoples of the Eastern
hemisphere watch impatiently for the moment
when by mutual defeats the iron rod
welded by either hand of armed power shall
be worn and broken. Every necessary
of life made costlier, the very finger of
Providence, by its shortening bounties in the
harvest field and its burning heats on land and
sea, pointing to a period Of intense tribula-
ton, how shall the people exult in mutual
slaughter?
The voice of the humble ascends to the
throne of God for rescue from this end
less scourge The prayers of all good
men 60 up necessarily for peace
and for the Punishment Of the causes
and instruments of war. How shall the
most venerable and most enlightened ma
tions of the world continue this bloody orgie
while on the hither borders of the ocean there
is spectacle of strength, prosperity and hap
piness with liberty, and without the sword,
continually offered to their gaze9 This war,
with its accumulated horrors, will do more to
utterly disgust men with the grim Moloch that
has so long deluded and trampled on them,
and its memories will more incline them to the