To the inquiry as to whether all this vast array of modern implements of destruction is to lessen the destruction of human life, shorten war, mitigate its horrors and tend toward peace, there can be but one answer. All these desirable results have been accomplished whenever the new inventions of importance have been used. “Warlike Tribes” have been put to flight so easily by civilised armies in modern times that such tribes have been doubted as possessing their boasted or even natural courage. Nations with a glorious past as to bravery but with a poor armament have gone down suddenly before smaller forces armed with modern ordnance. The results would have been reversed, and the derision would have proceeded from the other side, if the conditions had been reversed, and those tribes and brave peoples been armed with the best weapons and the knowledge of their use. The courage of the majority of men on the battle-field is begot of confidence and enthusiasm, but this confidence and enthusiasm, however great the cause, soon fail, and discretion becomes the better part of valour, if men find that their weapons are weak and useless against vastly superior arms of the enemy. The slaughter and destruction in a few hours with modern weapons may not be more terrible than could be inflicted with the old arms by far greater forces at close quarters in a greater length of time in the past, but the end comes sooner; and the prolongation of the struggle with renewed sacrifices of life, and the long continued and exhausting campaigns, giving rise to diseases more destructive than shot or shell, are thereby greatly lessened, if not altogether avoided. CHAPTER XVII. PAPER AND PRINTING. _Paper-making._--“The art preservative of all arts”--itself must have means of preservation, and hence the art of paper-making precedes the art of printing. It was Pliny who wrote, at the beginning of the Christian era, that “All the usages of civilised life depend in a remarkable degree upon the employment of paper. At all events the remembrance of past events.” Naturally to the Chinese, the Hindoo, and the Egyptian, we go with inquiries as to origin, and find that as to both arts they were making the most delicate paper from wood and vegetable fibres and printing with great nicety, long before Europeans had even learned to use papyrus or parchment, or had conceived the idea of type. So far as we know the wasp alone preceded the ancient Orientals in the making of paper. Its gray shingled house made in layers, worked up into paper by a master hand from decayed wood, pulped, and glutinised, waterproofed, with internal tiers of chambers, a fortress, a home, and an airy habitation, is still beyond the power of human invention to reproduce. Papyrus--the paper of the Egyptians: Not only their paper, but its pith one of their articles of food, and its outer portions material for paper, boxes, baskets, boats, mats, medicines, cloths and other articles of merchandise.