ly. It is natural that
such vagaries should overlook the fixed laws of Providence. Under
these laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, women, and
children who can but just ward off hunger, cold, and nakedness;
whose whole ideas of Mammon-worship are comprised in the search
for their daily food, clothing, shelter, fuel; whom any casualty
reduces to positive want; and whose already low estate is yet
further lowered and ground down, when "the blood-red blossom of
war flames with its heart of fire."...

Still war had, in times now gone by, ennobling elements and
tendencies of the less sordid kind. But one inevitable
characteristic of modern war is, that it is associated throughout,
in all particulars, with a vast and most irregular formation of
commercial enterprise. There is no incentive to Mammon-worship so
remarkable as that which it affords. The political economy of war
is now one of its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with
the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or hundreds of
millions which a war may cost, goes directly, and very violently,
to stimulate production, though it is intended ultimately for
waste or for destruction. Even apart from the fact that war
suspends, _ipso facto_, every rule of public thrift, and tends to
sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure for which it
makes such unbounded calls, it therefore is the greatest feeder of
that lust of gold which we are told is the essence of commerce,
though we had hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It
is, however, more than this; for the regular commerce of peace is
tameness itself compared with the gambling spirit which war,
through the rapid shiftings and high prices which it brings,
always introduces into trade. In its moral operation it more
resembles, perhaps the finding of a new gold-field, than anything
else.

More remarkable than either of these two is his piece on Leopardi (1850),
the Italian poet, whose philosophy and (M194) frame of mind, said Mr.
Gladstone, "present more than any other that we know, more even than that
of Shelley, the character of unrelieved, unredeemed desolation--the very
qualities in it which attract pitying sympathy, depriving it of all
seductive power." It is curious that he should have selected one whose
life lay along a course like Leopardi's for commemora