Elihu Burritt: "If there is one sentiment that more than another marks the civilization of the present day, it is the interest felt in human life. Sympathy with human suffering is the most distinctive characteristic of our age. Never before in the world's history were there such associated efforts to diminish or prevent suffering. The societies organized for this purpose are almost innumerable. Great calamities by fire, pestilence, or famine are almost drowned by the flood of benevolence thus brought to bear upon them...A shipwreck, a railway accident, or any other catastrophe which destroys human life, produces the same feeling in the community. Sometimes a single life put in peril will fill a nation's heart with anxiety and grief.
"...Now compare the feeling with which the community hears of the loss or peril of a few human lives by these accidents with the feelings with which the news of the death or mutilation of thousands of men, equally precious, on the field of battle is received. How different is the valuation! How different in universal sympathy! War seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization, to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism, to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts. This has always seemed to me one of war's worst works, because it destroys also the sense of the ruin and misery which the sword makes in the world."
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