some few exceptions, he is the ablest general that can practise the greatest deceit, and support it by the greatest violence; who can best develop the designs of others, and best conceal his own; who can best enact both parts of hypocrisy, by simulaing to be what he is not and dissembling that which he is: persuading his adversary that he is most strong when he is most weak, and most weak when he is in fact most strong. He is not to be over scrupulous as to the justice of his cause, for might is his right and artillery his argument; with the makeweight of courage thrown into the scale, there are few requisites for a Jonathan Wild or a Turpin, that are not equally necessary for a Tippoo or a Tamerlane. The difference is less in the things than in the names. Thus, the callous effrontery of the one becomes the coolest presence of mind in the other; fraud is dignified by the title of skill, and robbery with that of requisition. To plot the death of an individual, is a conspiracy, but to confederate to destroy a people, is a coalition; and pillage and murder seem to lose their horrors, in precise proportion to the magnitude of their scale and the multitude of their victims. But a consummate captain must have courage, or at least be thought to have it; for courage, like charity, covers a multitude of sins: and he is by common consent allowed to sport with the lives of others, who is supposed to have no value for his own. But the time is fast approaching with the many, and now is with the few, when mere military talent, abstractedly considered, and without any reference to the ends for which it be displayed, will hardly secure its possessor a glory more longlived than a gazette, or a memorial more splendid than a signpost. The fact is, that posterity has and will appreciate the merit of great commanders, not by the skill with which they have handled their tools, but by the uses to which they have applied them. Suppose we were to grant that the art of cutting throats vere a very difficult art, yet even then the merits of this art must be measured, not by its diffi culty, but by its utility; and the value of the remedy must be adjusted by the propriety of the application: but in resorting to such a remedy as war, I suspect that it will be found that all the difficulties of such phlebotomy belong to the patient, but the facilities to the surgeon. Mere martial glory, independent of all considerations as to the necessity and the justice of our arms, is now fast descending, with many other worn-out fooleries, to the tomb of all the Capulets, where, attended by bankrupt agents, disgorged contractors, and starving commissaries, let us pray that, with all due military honours, it may be speedily buried and embalmed; let hireling poets indite its dirge, and meddling monks say masses for its soul. All wars of interference, arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of the other states; all wars of ambition, carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement; and all wars of aggression, undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions; all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base.

First, there is the hypocrisy of encumbering our neighbour with an officiousness of help, that pretends his good, but means our own; then there is the hypocrisy of ambition, where some restless and grasping potentate, knowing that he is about to injure and insult, puts forth a jesuitical preamble, purporting that he himself has been first insulted and injured; but nations have the justest cause to feel a fear that is real, when such begin to express a fear that is feigned. Then comes the hypocrisy of those who would persuade us that to kill, burn, and destroy, for conscience's sake, is an acceptable service, and that religion is to be supported by trampling under foot those primary principles of love, charity, and forbearance, without which it were better to have none. Lastly, comes a minor and subordinate hypocrisy, common to the three kinds I have stated above; I mean that of those who pretend most deeply to deplore the miseries of war, and who even weep over them, with the tears of the crocodile, but who will not put a stop to war, although they have the means, because they find their own private account in continuing it, from the emoluments it bestows and from the patronage it confers. Like Fabius, they also profit by delay, 'cunctando restituere rem, but they do so with a very different motive, not to restore the shattered fortunes of their country, but their own. Neither must we forget, in this view of our subject, the raw and ignorant recruit, whom to delude and to kidnap, a whole system of fraud and hypocrisy is marshalled out and arrayed. The grim idol of war is tricked out and flounced in all the colours of the rainbow: the neighing steed awaits her nod, music attends her footsteps, and jollity caters at her board; but no sooner is the sickle exchanged for the sword and the fell contract signed, than he finds that this Bellona, whom he had wooed as a goddess in court ship, turns out to be a demon in possession; that

terror is her constant purveyor, and that her alternate caterers are privation and waste; that her sojourn is with the slain, and her abode with the pestilence; that her fascinations are more fatal than those of the basilisk; that her brightest smile is danger, and that her warmest embrace is death. We are told that civilization marches in the rear of conquest, and that barbarous nations have received this boon, at least, from the refined and polished blades of their victors. This argument in favour of war may, I trust, be neutralized by the consideration that the strongest hands have not always been united to the brightest heads; for the rudest nations have in their turn retaliated on the most refined; and from a darkness more dense than that of Egypt, the thunderbolt of victory has been elicited, as the brightest lightning from the blackest cloud. Greece has twice surrendered her independence and liberties to masters, in every thing but force, far inferior to herself; the first treated her as a mistress, the second as a slave. Imperial Rome* herself, in her high and palmy state, when in the proudest possession of all the arts of each Minerva, was doomed in her turn to be the prey of a savage horde that despised both, and

'No, freedom! no, I will not tell

How Rome, before thy weeping face, With heaviest sound, a giant statue fell; Pushed, by a wild and artless race, From off its wide ambitious base:

When time his northern sons of spoil awoke,

And every blended work of strength and grace,
With many a rude repeated stroke,

And many a savage yell, to thousand fragments broke.
Collins's Ode to Freedom.

studied neither. But if the argument I am combating ever had any force, it could only have been when knowledge was in its infancy and the world in its childhood. The general spread of civilization, by commerce, the sciences, and the arts-those legitimate daughters, not of war but of peace-not of the vulture, but of the halcyon-these are the blessings that will make the hardest advocate shrink from recommending warfare as a present instrument of civilization; particularly in an era that presents us with means far more grateful, elegant, and efficacious; an era when we have the safety-lamp of science to resort to, a lamp that gives us all the light, but none of the conflagration. In fact, the demoralizing tendencies of war are so notorious, that to insist upon them would be to insult the understanding of my readers; and to purchase refinement at the expense of virtue, would be to purchase tinsel at the price of gold. The most peace-loving minister that ever governed the affairs of a nation, decidedly declared, that even the most successful war often left a people more poor, always more profligate, than it found them Where a nation rises with one consent to shake off the yoke of oppression, either from within or from without, all fair concessions having been proposed in vain, here indeed we have a motive that both dignifies the effort, and consecrates the success, here indeed the most peaceable sect of the most peaceable religion might conscientiously combine. But, alas! how few wars have been justified by such a principle, and how few warriors by such a plea; and when they have, how unfortunate have they usually been in the choice of their leaders! in the motley mob of conquerors and of captains, how few Wash