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 com bating 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

ingtons or Alfreds shall we find! The children of those days, when the world was young, rude as the times they lived in, and rash at once from igno rance and from inexperience, amused themselves with the toys and the trumpets, the gewgaws and the glitter of war. But we who live in the maturity of things, who to the knowledge of the present add a retrospection of the past, we who alone can fairly be termed the ancients, or be said to live in the olden time; we, I trust, are no longer to be deluded or befooled by this brilliant but baneful meteor, composed of visionary good, but of substantial evil. We live in the manhood and in the fulness of time, and the triumphs of truth and of reason, triumphs bright as bloodless; these are the proper business and the boast of those who, having put away childish things, are becoming men. There are some that with oracular gravity will inform us, that as wars have ever been, they must on that account continue to be; but they might as well assert that the imbecility and ignorance that marked the conduct of our forefathers, those ancient moderns, who lived in the infancy of the world, and in the childhood of time, must and do exist at present, because they existed then. With a solitary exception, all warfare is built upon hypocrisy, acting upon ignorance; ignorance it was that lent success to Mahomet's miracles, and to Cromwell's cant. For lack of knowledge a people is destroyed.; and knowledge alone it is that is worthy of holding the freest minds in the firmest thraldom. Unlike those of the warrior, the triumphs of knowledge derive all their lustre, not from the evil they have produced, but from the good; her successes and her conquest are the common property of the world, and suc. ceeding ages will be the watchful guardians of the rich legacies she bequeaths. The trophies and the titles of the conqueror are on the quick march to oblivion, and amid that desolation where they were planted, will decay. For what are the triumphs of war,* planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? the means are the sacrifice of the many; the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few. Knowledge has put a stop to chivalry, as she one day will to war, and Cervantes has laughed out of the field those selfconstituted legislators that carried the sword, but not the scales of justice, and who were mounted and mailed. I am no advocate for a return of this state of things; but when that heroic and chivalric spirit was abroad, when men volunteered on dangers for the good of others, without emolument, and laid down the sword when that for which they resorted to it was overcome, then indeed a measure