The treatment of prisoners has been profoundly modified. Quarter, it is true, has been very often refused in modern wars to rebels, to soldiers in mutiny, to revolted slaves, to savages who themselves give no quarter. It has been often--perhaps generally--refused to irregular soldiers like the French Francs-tireurs in the War of 1870, who without uniforms endeavoured to defend their homes against invasion. It was long refused to soldiers who, having rejected terms of surrender, continued to defend an indefensible place, but this severity during the last three centuries has been generally condemned. But, on the whole, the treatment of the conquered soldier has steadily improved. At one time he was killed. At another he was preserved as a slave. Then he was permitted to free himself by payment of a ransom; now he is simply kept in custody till he is exchanged or released on parole, or till the termination of the war. In the latter half of the present century many elaborate and beneficent regulations for the preservation of hospitals and the good treatment of the wounded have been sanctioned by international agreement. The distinction between the civil population and combatants has been increasingly observed. As a general rule non-combatants, if they do not obstruct the enemy, are subjected to no further injury than that of paying war contributions and in other ways providing for the subsistence of the invaders. The wanton destruction of private property has been more and more avoided. Such an act as the devastation of the Palatinate under Louis XIV. would now in a European war be universally condemned, though the wholesale destruction of villages in our own Indian frontier wars and the methods employed on both sides in the civil war in Cuba appear to have borne much resemblance to it. In the treatment of merchants the rule of reciprocity which was laid down in Magna Charta is largely observed, and the Conference of Brussels in 1874 pronounced it to be contrary to the laws of war to bombard an unfortified town. The great Civil War in America probably contributed not a little to raise the standard of humanity in war; for while few long wars have been fought with such determination or at the cost of so many lives, very few have been conducted with such a scrupulous abstinence from acts of wanton barbarity.