Notable progress, too, was being made along another line.
Humanitarianism in its modern connotation is the child of the
nineteenth century. To feel distress over the knowledge that famine or
other ill afflicts a distant people is a purely modern accomplishment
of which our forefathers of two or three centuries ago were wholly
innocent. As applied to armies, the humanitarian impulse has worked a
startling revolution. Organizations designed to care for the sick and
the wounded have developed on an elaborate scale. The Red Cross was
called into being only half a century ago as an indirect result of the
horrors of the battlefield of Solferino. It was born too late to have
any share in alleviating the miseries of our own Civil War but since
that time it has constituted an ever increasing agency for the relief
of human suffering, whether in peace or in war. Even the “unspeakable
Turk” has been infected by the virus of humanitarianism and the Red
Crescent plays for the Mohammedan world the rôle fulfilled by the Red
Cross among the nations of Christendom.