Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/33

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INFLUENCE OF THE PRESS.
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and picture to themselves all the circumstances and incidents of every stage of a campaign, divested of all the adventitious drapery wherewith the seductive language of romance and the artful machinations of Government officials have succeeded in investing it. The newspaper press in England and the United States, and to an increasing extent in Continental countries, involves an elaborate mechanism, having wide ramifications everywhere, and supported by a keen spirit of competition and honorable esprit dc corps. The result was signally witnessed in the War of 1870 between France and Germany, and still more in the War of 1877-'78 between Russia and Turkey. Special correspondents of superior intelligence and tried capacity, representing each of the leading English daily papers, accompanied the stall of both the opposed armies as they were treated on the most honorable and even friendly and familiar footing by the officers on each side, and every opportunity was afforded them for making themselves masters of all the events as they happened, rapidly transmitting their communications — often by a special service — homeward.

The result was that, for thousands upon thousands of readers Horrors of War revealed by newspaper correspondents. in the most tranquil, though industrially active, towns and even in the most sequestered villages, the whole story of the conflict, as it raged from day to day, was told with almost unerring accuracy and clearness, by a chosen body of eye-witnesses, in amicable competition with one another. Not only the actual battle, but the preparations and the waiting for it, the quickened march, the camp life, the mode of intercourse with invaded villagers and townspeople, the very conversation and moral tone of the soldier on either side at each turn of the campaign, were made to live before men's eyes in such pomp and circumstance as literary skill could impart to them.

What the story was, and what a ghastly contrast it presented to the idealized nobility of War, many will recall with shudder-