Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 6

too nice and dreamy and speculative for
the actual work of life. But you never were more mistaken. He is
leaving behind him some of the finest manufactories and best-tilled
fields in the world. Moreover, he is an admirable painter and, as all the
world knows, an almost unequalled musician; or if you want proof of
his genius for business, look at the speed and regularity with which he
and his comrades have transported themselves to the Rhine, and see the
perfection of all the arrangements of his regiment. And now, if you
think his "bad habits," his daily violations of your notions of propriety,
have diminished his power of meeting death calmly--that noblest of
products of culture--you have only to follow him up as far as Sedan and
see whether he ever flinches; whether you have ever read or heard of a
soldier out of whom more marching and fighting and dying, and not
flighty, boisterous dying either, could be got.
Now, we can very well understand why people should be unwilling to
see the Prussian military system spread into other countries, or even be
preserved where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have the men of a whole

civilized nation spending so much time out of the flower of their years
learning to kill other men; and the lesson to be drawn from the recent
Prussian successes is assuredly not that every country ought to have an
army like the Prussian army, though we confess that, if great armies
must be kept up, there is no better model than the Prussian. The lesson
is that, whether you want him for war or peace, there is no way in
which you can get so much out of a man as by training him, and
training him not in pieces but the whole of him; and that the trained
men, other things being equal, are pretty sure in the long run to be the
masters of the world.

THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS
We had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of controversy with the
Christian Union as to the comparative morality of the Prussians and
Americans, or, rather, their comparative religiousness--meaning by
religiousness a disposition "to serve others and live as in God's sight;"
in other words, unselfishness and spirituality. We let it drop, from the
feeling that the question whether the Americans or Prussians were the
better men was only a part, and a very small part, of the larger question.
How do we discover which of any two nations is the purer in its life or
in its aims? and, is not any judgment we form about it likely to be very
defective, owing to the inevitable incompleteness of our premises? We
are not now going to try to fix the place of either Prussia or the United
States in the scale of morality, but to point out some reasons why all
comparisons between them should be made by Americans with
exceeding care and humility. There is hardly any field of inquiry in
which even the best-informed man is likely to fall into so many errors;
first, because there is no field in which the vision is so much affected
by prejudices of education and custom; and, secondly, because there is
none in which the things we see are so likely to create erroneous
impressions about the things we do not see. But we may add that it is a
field which no intelligent and sensible man ever explores without
finding his charity greatly stimulated.
Let us give some illustrations of the errors into which people are apt to
fall in it. Count Gasparin, a French Protestant, and as spiritually minded
a man as breathed, once talking with an American friend expressed in
strong terms his sense of the pain it caused him that Mr. Lincoln should

have been at the theatre when he was killed, not, the friend found,
because he objected in the least to theatre-going, but because it was the
evening of Good Friday--a day which the Continental Calvinists "keep"
with great solemnity, but to which American non-episcopal Protestants
pay no attention whatever. Count Gasparin, on the other hand, would
have no hesitation in taking a ride on Sunday, or going to a public
promenade after church hours, and, from seeing him there, his
American friend would draw deductions just as unfavorable to the
Count's religious character as the Count himself drew with regard to Mr.
Lincoln's.
Take, again, the question of drinking beer and wine. There is a large
body of very excellent men in America who, from a long contemplation
of the evils wrought by excessive indulgence in intoxicating drinks,
have worked themselves up to a state of mind about all use of such
drinks which is really discreditable