Friends, I know not whether this thing be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy.  It is quite unspeakably both.  Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden separated only by a fruit wall from his next door neighbour’s; and he had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing-room.  I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such and such a paper might be desirable—­perhaps a little fresco here and there on the ceiling—­a damask curtain or so at the windows.  “Ah,” says my employer, “damask curtains, indeed!  That’s all very fine, but you know I can’t afford that kind of thing just now!” “Yet the world credits you with a splendid income!” “Ah, yes,” says my friend, “but do you know, at present I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?” “Steel-traps! for whom?” “Why, for that fellow on the other side the wall, you know:  we’re very good friends, capital friends; but we are obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns.  The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there’s never a day passes that we don’t find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it altogether; and I don’t see how we’re to do with less.”  A highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic.  Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart’s blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that.  You don’t know what to do with yourselves for a sensation:  fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life:  you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made:  but then the worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not.[205]

I must get back to the matter in hand, however.  Believe me, without further instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation’s vice, or virtue, was written in its art:  the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice.  I have no time to do this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now);[206] but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner.