In a battle, every one who is killed diminishes by so much the strength of the army.  In industry, a workshop is shut up only when what it produced is obtained by the public from another source and in greater abundance.  Figure a state of things where for one man killed on the spot two should rise up full of life and vigor.  Were such a state of things possible, war would no longer merit its name.

This, however, is the distinctive character of what is so absurdly called industrial war.

Let the Belgians and the English lower the price of their iron ever so much; let them, if they will, send it to us for nothing:  this might extinguish some of our blast-furnaces; but immediately, and as a necessary consequence of this very cheapness, there would rise up a thousand other branches of industry more profitable than the one which had been superseded.

We arrive, then, at the conclusion that domination by labor is impossible, and a contradiction in terms, seeing that all superiority which manifests itself among a people means cheapness, and tends only to impart force to all other nations.  Let us banish, then, from political economy all terms borrowed from the military vocabulary:  to fight with equal weapons, to conquer, to crush, to stifle, to be beaten, invasion, tribute, etc.  What do such phrases mean?  Squeeze them, and you obtain nothing.  Yes, you do obtain something; for from such words proceed absurd errors, and fatal and pestilent prejudices.  Such phrases tend to arrest the fusion of nations, are inimical to their peaceful, universal, and indissoluble alliance, and retard the progress of the human race.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

(1821-1867)

BY GRACE KING

Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821; he died there in 1867.  Between these dates lies the evolution of one of the most striking personalities in French literature, and the development of an influence which affected not only the literature of the poet’s own country, but that of all Europe and America.  The genuineness of both personality and influence was one of the first critical issues raised after Baudelaire’s advent into literature; it is still one of the main issues in all critical consideration of him.  A question which involves by implication the whole relation of poetry, and of art as such, to life, is obviously one that furnishes more than literary issues, and engages other than literary interests.  And thus, by easy and natural corollaries, Baudelaire has been made a subject of appeal not only to judgment, but even to conscience.  At first sight, therefore, he appears surrounded either by an intricate moral maze, or by a no less troublesome confusion of contradictory theories from opposing camps rather than schools of criticism.  But no author—­no dead author—­is more accessible, or more communicable in his way; his poems, his theories, and a goodly portion of his life, lie at the disposition of any reader who cares to know him.