The stride is clearly a great one from Pyrrhus, the Epirot king, who, when asked which of two musicians he thought the better, only deigned to reply that Polysperchon was the general, to Napoleon, the French emperor, who conferred the cross of the Legion of Honour on Crescentini the singer. And as the pursuit of arms comes with advancing civilisation to occupy a lower level as compared with the arts of peace, so the belief is the mark of a more polished people that the rapacity and cruelty which belong to the war customs of a more backward nation, or of an earlier time, are absent from their own. They invent the expression _civilised warfare_ to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet? And why should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? We are shocked at the mention of barbarian tribes who poison their arrows, or barb their darts, yet ourselves think nothing of the frightful gangrenes caused by the copper cap in the Minié rifle-ball, and reject, on the score of the expense of the change, the proposal that bullets of soft lead, which cause needless pain, should no longer be used among the civilised Powers for small-arm ammunition.[205] But whilst the difference in these respects between barbarism and civilisation is thus one that rather touches the surface than the substance of war, the result is inevitably in either state a different code of military etiquette and sentiment, though the difference is far less than in any other points of comparison between them. When the nations of Christendom therefore came in contact with unknown and savage races, whose customs seemed different from their own and little worthy of attention, they assumed that the latter recognised no laws of war, much as some of the earlier travellers denied the possession or faculty of speech to people whose language they could not interpret. From which assumption the practical inference followed, that the restraints which were held sacred between enemies who inherited the same traditions of military honour had no need to be observed in hostilities with the heathen world. It is worth while, therefore, to show how baseless was the primary assumption, and how laws of war, in no way dissimilar to those of Europe, may be detected in the military usages of barbarism.