No. 181. Vol. XXXI.] THE of Econ [January, 1905. REVIEW OF REVIEWS THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD. The Net Gain of the Old Year. LONDON, January 2nd, 1905. The Old Year-a bloody old year -has departed, giving place to a New Year that promises to be bloodier still. The carnage in the Far East shows no sign of abatement. The enforced truce on the Sha-ho cannot last much longer, and the New Year will not have long to wait for its baptism of blood. In face of the human shambles in Manchuria, it may seem somewhat absurd to ask what 1904 has done for human progress. But possibly the answer may be found in these very shambles. For, after all, the killing of the bodies of men is only the outward and visible sign of the inward bitterness, hatred and contempt which poisoned their minds and hearts long before the signal was given for slaughter. The great horror of war, from the moralist's point of view, is not the premature death by torture, more or less rapid, of thousands of men, but the abiding hatred which it sets up between the contending nations. It was a comparatively small thing that half a million French and Germans died in battle in 1870-71, compared with the fact that eighty or ninety millions of French and Germans ever since then have glared at each other across the new frontier in hatred. Now, the gain of this war is that out of all the killing the two combatants have learned mutual respect. The war has generated more admiration than hatred and contempt. General Nogi, of Port Arthur. General Baron K. Nogi is the commander of the Japanese Army inten tion of minimising the indescribable abominations of a war which might as easily have been averted as our own war in South Africa by an appeal to arbitration, that I dwell for a moment upon one advantage it has brought in its train. Both combatants have proved to the most vulgar-minded, self-conceited Briton that as fighters the Russian and the Jap are man for man at least as good as any British troops. This may be humbling to our national self-conceit, but even our braggarts of the Yellow Press are constrained to admit that the British Army never displayed in the whole of the Boer War anything approaching to the death-defying valour of |