Year: 1859

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 We are apparently on the eve of the most tremendous armed conflict the world has seen since the days of the Great Napoleon. The wars ofimperial France were bloody wars as all the world knows No slaughtered heta emperor piled them The dead never lay so thickly on any battlefield of which history makes mention, as they lay on Eylau and Boro- dino and Waterloo.

 | But 1t is not saying too much to say thatif the European powers let their armed hordes l loose upon one another this summer, ruthless destroyer as Napoleon was he will be shown before three years are over, to have been a mere tyro in the art of destruction. Since his day all the arts have advanced with rapid strides but none with strides so rapid as thls one. The weapons with which the bridge of Lodi was carried and Austerlitz and Marengo were won, bear much the same resemblance to the rifle of the present day as the matchlock bore to the old musket Death did not in his time flash from serried ranks until the foeman stood two or three hundred yards apart It now flies in the air nearly three-quarters of a mile, so far as the sharpest eye can mark hu- man figure. His siege artillerywould be to-day by no means heavy pieces. Wellington's hea- viest preaching guns at Badjados and Salaman- ca were twenty-fOur pounders. The Russians at Inkerman and the British at the Tchernaya brought thirty-twc pounders into the field w5tla ease and effect But the advantage which heavy guns have hitherto had over light ones for the ordinary purpose of field artillery, has been rather in the length fthe range than the size of the ball Science has in our day des- troyed the difference between them. Recent inventions, some of them those of our own countrymen, some of Englishmen, and some of the present Emperor of France, have furnished | light field d-peces, which four horses can whrl at the widest gallop from point to point, with more than the deadly power which forty years ago belonged only to weapons which sixteen horses could move with difficulty, and which were only used for permenent batteries

 Moreover, facilities have been created since Waterloo was fought, for bringing together masses of men thus armed, and dashing them against one another, such as the great Napoleon in his widest dreams never dreamed of We all know how the rapidity of his movements dazzled and astonished our fathers We know how he strode over Europe like magician talk ing armies up, as it seemed In those days, in the hollow of his hand, and in finging them in the twinkling of an eye on every point where his giant plans needed them We know how dis tauce seemed to shrivel up at the blast of his trumpet We know how the pupils of Turenne and Montecuculli recoiled in dismay before le gions which stuuck like thunderbolt after hay ing advanced like the wind But great as was the perfection to which he carried the art of ra- pid concentration, it becomes the crawling of a turtle when compared with the power with which railways have armed the generals of our day. When Napolen started ou his exped- tions, armies were of necessity divided into columns, which, in order to secure the bare means of subsistence and transport, were com pelled either to follow each other at tolerable long intervals, or else march on the same point by different circuitous routes. And they did march--literally marched, trudged every inch of the way on foot, and the eagle Tapped his wings over them in appreciation if they achieved fifty miles in the twenty-four hours. The mad dest impatience of the maddest conqueror had in those times to adapt itself to the capabilities ! of human legs and human stoms ehs.

 | It took, even in tAe hands ofNapoleon,a long while to concentrate two hundred thousand men at point three hundred miles distanti and when they were there it required stupendous energy and stupendous resources to feed them All the grand old heroes had to take pork and flour into their grandest calculations and pork