that beautiful ship is sinking beneath the waves, its snowy canvass torn and stripped, its deck slippery with human blood, fragments of human bodies strewed every where, the sea crimsoned with the current of life, the cockpit filled with those who are enduring every extremity of torture. Now a smile of joy lights up the distorted features of these mangled victims; word is passed that the enemy's ship is foundering, a shout of victory goes up from those parched and dying lips, and down they go, victor and vanquished, a thousand fathoms into the boiling ocean. What a triumph this! What a work for Christian hands! What a dying hour for a disciple of the Prince of Peace! What a condition in which to meet Him who died for his foes!

Shall I be told, that a nation may be insulted, if it will not fight? I answer, it insults itself, if it does; a far greater evil. I shall be asked, if defensive war is wrong; but what is defensive war? Can it be defined? Is it not an intangible idea in the minds of most persons? But granting that revenge, retaliation, rendering evil for evil, were the spirit of Christianity, it would be a very uncertain rule to act upon. Indeed, it could not be acted upon at all; caprice and passion alone would decide the justice or injustice of the war. What nation has ever taken up arms, which has not stoutly contended that she was maintaining her rights? Not one.-Shall I be told, that the nation that declares war first, is in the wrong? Then our revolutionary war was wrong; then the Polish war was wrong.-Shall I be told, that nations have a right to resist oppression, to rebel if unjust laws are imposed? Who is to decide whether the law is unjust or not;-the party imposing the law, or the party obeying it? Not the party imposing the law, or we were wrong in our Revolution. So Greece, Poland, South America, every free state upon the earth. Nor can you give to the subiect this right of adjudication; for then you would annihilate all government. If an individual or a community may shoot down the man who comes delegated to enforce a law, because they do not like it, "chaos and old night" would again set up their kingdom on the earth. The Pennsylvania and Massachusetts rebellions would be right; the Baltimore and New York mobs would be right. What, then, is defensive war? Why does this intangible idea float in the minds of so many, that defensive wars are right, when a defensive war cannot be defined? The truth is, men see wars right, when they think that they are for their own interest.—It is said, again, that a man may fight for his liberty, that he is solemnly, religiously bound to fight for it. How much liberty may he fight for? How much must he be oppressed before he may "render evil for evil?" Let the amount be defined. This cannot be done. No man can tell how deep the chain shall have cut into the flesh before the sufferer may stab his master. It may be a tax of three cents per pound on tea; it may be a stain upon that airy nothing, national honor; or it may be slavery in its worst forms.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS.

THE DELUSIONS AND SUICIDAL RESULTS OF WAR.

WAR is the law of violence, PEACE the law of love. That law of violence prevailed without mitigation, from the murder of Abel to the advent of the Prince of Peace. During all that period of forty centuries, war appeared to be the great end of all the institutions of society. Governments seemed to be successfully organized, only when strong for the destruction of others. Rulers were deemed fortunate and illustrious only when marches and battle-fields, burning cities and shattered navies were the trophies of their renown. The warrior was the great man, and peace was regarded as worthy only of the vulgar, ignorant multitude; as the natural state not of the free, but of the slave. The spirit of all those ages was embodied in the sentiment of Cleomenes: Homer is the poet of the Spartans, because he sings of war; Hesiod of the Helots, because agriculture is his theme. War was considered as the only natural state of government in all its forms of despotism, oligarchy and democracy. Even in the comparatively free states of Greece and Italy, war was the master passion of the people, the master spring of government. The republicans of antiquity appear to have lived in vain, unless they died in battle; and all the vital powers of their government were so entirely military, that they perished as soon as they lost the capacity to make war successfully. With war, as the prevailing spirit of all their institutions, these republics demonstrated how utterly unfit the people are to govern themselves, if the law of violence be the fundamental law of their social compact; that, if nations, though comparatively free and enlightened, live by the sword, they shall perish by the sword; that the law of violence is the law of murder to others, of suicide to ourselves.

We might have imagined, if history had not attested the reverse, that an experiment of four thousand years would have sufficed to prove, that the rational ends of society can never be attained by constructing its institutions in conformity with the standard of war; but the sword and the torch had been eloquent in vain. A thousand battle-fields, white with the bones of brothers, were counted as idle advocates in the cause of justice and humanity. Ten thousand cities, abandoned to the cruelty and licentiousness of the soldiery, and burnt, or dismantled, or razed to the ground, pleaded in vain against the law of violence. The river, the lake, the sea, crimsoned with the blood of fellow-citizens, and neighbors, and strangers, had lifted up their voices in vain to denounce the folly and wickedness of war. The shrieks and agonies, the rage and hatred, the

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wounds and curses of the battle-field, and the storm and the sack, had scattered in vain their terrible warnings throughout all lands. In vain had the insolent Lysander destroyed the walls, and burnt the fleets of Athens, to the music of her own female flute players. In vain had the disgrace and the sufferings of Miltiades and Nicias, of Themistocles, Pausanias and Alcibiades, of Marius and Sylla, of Hannibal, Pompey and Cæsar, filled the nations with pity and dismay. The lamentations of the widow, and the tears of the orphan, the broken hearts of age, and the blasted hopes of youth, and beauty, and love, had pleaded in vain against the law of violence. The earth had drunk in the life-blood of the slain, and hidden their mangled bodies in her bosom; and there the garden, the orchard and the harvest flourished once more beautiful in the tints of nature, and rich in the melody of fount, and leaf, and breeze. The waters had swallowed into their depths the dying and the dead, and the ruined fleets both of victor and vanquished; and again the waves danced in their sportiveness, or rushed in their fury, over the battle-plain of hostile navies. The innocence of childhood had forgotten the parent's death, the widow had recovered the lost smile of former years, the miserable old man had been gathered to his fathers, and affection had found new objects for its attachments. The ancient and modern Assyrian, the Babylonish, Median and Persian empires; the kingdoms of ancient and modern Egypt, of Judah and Israel, and of all the successors of Alexander; the commercial states of Tyre, and Rhodes, and Carthage; the republics of Greece and Italy, and the barbarians of Spain, and Gaul, and Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, had submitted to the allconquering eagle. The terrible judgment, "all they that take the sword, shall perish by the sword," had been written in letters of blood on the land and the ocean, on the palaces of kings, and the cottages of peasants, on the senate houses of the people, and the temples of their false and cruel gods. The Roman empire, the grave of a hundred states, was destined to illustrate more remarkably than all the preceding nations, that the law of violence is a selfdestroyer. Her power had been constantly extending nearly eight hundred years, till a single city had swelled to the magnitude of an empire embracing the fairest portions of Africa, Europe and Asia. But her law had ever been, and was still, the law of violence. Her battle shout of defiance had pierced the deep gloom of the Hercynian forest; and the Goth, the Burgundian, the Vandal and the Hun, came down to the feast of victory at the trumpet-summons. Their progress was terrific, as when the mountain torrent rushes in its fury to sweep away the vineyard and the harvest, the peasant's cabin, the shepherd and his flock. The Pyrenees, the Alps, and the Balkan range were feeble barriers against the children of eternal snows; and, as the barbarians poured down from those mountain summits the wild music of their battle songs over the beautiful and delicious regions of Iberia, Italy and Greece, the Roman empire confessed in her agony of fear, that the sword was her only title to all her dominions from the rising to the setting sun. What pencil

can faithfully picture the terrible realities of that ferocious struggle? The Roman empire, the mightiest structure of the whole ancient world, ITSELF THE COLOSSAL TEMPLE OF WAR, perished by the sword and faggot of barbarians. The august colonades that towered along the shores of the Atlantic, and the banks of the Euphrates, were defaced and shattered. The vast roof which had sheltered a hundred nations, the walls whose ample circuit had embraced a continent of territory, were rent, and cast down, and scattered far and wide. Even the very shrine and altar of the god of war, the self-styled eternal city, was burnt, and sacked, and enslaved by Alaric and Attila, by Genseric, Totila and Theodoric. Of all that spacious and majestic structure, nothing remained in western Europe, but a chaos of ruins, and here and there a pillar, solitary and solemn, as those of Colonna, Palmyra or Chelminar. The only inscription which the conquerors vouchsafed for the monument of the most illustrious and powerful of ancient empires, was the prophecy so fearfully fulfilled, "They that take the sword shall perish by the sword."

THE PEOPLE MORE PEACEFUL THAN RULERS.

To the provincial military tyrannies of Rome, succeeded the feudal aristocracies and monarchies of the victors; whilst the sudden rise of the Saracens contributed to perpetuate the law of violence. The whole structure of society in the civilized portions of Europe, then became more decidedly military than it had ever been; for the feudal system was singularly adapted to a state of endless warfare at home and abroad. Martial law was the great, the universal law of society. The people, as well as the rulers, were all soldiers; and every community exhibited the spectacle of a standing army, and a permanent encampment. Age after age rolled away; and at length the arts of peace so far prevailed over those of war, that SOCIETY lost its military character, but the administration of GovERNMENT, and the spirit of RULERS, remained the same. The people had indeed been changed; but the great, permanent institutions of society partook not of the same spirit. The sword was still the sceptre of the monarch, and the casque of the warrior his favorite crown. Governments, instead of being the fountains of peace abroad, and happiness at home, became the instruments of misery and injustice in the hands of conquerors and tyrants. The people went onward in the improvement of their condition, yet exercised comparatively no influence on the character of rulers. Although the institutions of society can have but ONE rational object, the good of the people, yet the end was forever sacrificed to the means, the good of the people to the power of rulers. This state of things still prevails; for experience testifies that, if the law of war be no longer the fundamental law of European society, it is still the fundamental law of their governments. The fate of all those nations still depends, to a vast extent, on the personal character of monarchs and their counsellors; and such must continue to be the destiny of that continent, until the progress of events shall have recon

structed their governments in conformity with the great truth, THE PEOPLE ARE MASTERS, AND THE RULERS, SERVANTS. Thus far, the chief responsibility of their rulers has been to the law of violence, to the axe and the scaffold. And although something has been gradually done in some portions of Europe, to meliorate the political condition of the people, and restrain the power and ambition of rulers, yet, if the advancement of reform be in after years correspondent to the past, the American republic will number a hundred states, before the work shall have been accomplished. Fortunately for the world, it can hardly be said, that there is now in it any state of society constituted on the principles of war. No military republics, like those of Greece and Rome, torment the nations, and entail on their own posterity the curse of fire and sword. The feudal system, as the domestic and social constitution of European communities, has utterly perished; and as soon should we expect the age of Arthur and the Round Table, of Charlemagne and his Paladins to return, as to see the people in any country again modelled on the military principles of the feudo-social com pact. Hence the great object of reform is GOVERNMENT; and its reconstruction any where, on principles of responsibility to the people, will be a glorious triumph in the cause of Peace.

It must be obvious, that the interest and happiness of the PEOPLE are hostile to war; that if left to themselves, however ignorant and uneducated, they would scarcely ever make war; that of the battles and sieges which have brought such misery into the world, not one in a hundred would have occurred, had it depended on the people; that all their personal habits and social intercourse, all their employments, affections and duties, are inimical to war, and friendly to peace. How demoniac, then, is that spirit which debauches the people by ambition and the love of military fame, and breathes into all their institutions, as its living principle, the spirit of bloodshed and violence! The good sense, the duties and affections of the people revolt at such things; and the ascendency of their influence in its natural wholesome state, must exterminate war. The most ignorant states of society contain in themselves the elements of peace. Who can believe that the mass of society in the countries ravaged by the ancient or modern warrior, entered into the spirit of those wars, any otherwise than as sufferers burning with rage and revenge at their miseries? This is equally true of nearly all the wars that have ever existed. The most ignorant and unrefined, as well as the most enlightened and polished states of society, are equally hostile to war in their duties, interests, affections and employments. Justly to represent these, is the great duty of government. To give them an authoritative voice in affairs of state, is the great object of every true friend of the people; but the people, unless educated, cannot exercise a wholesome authoritative control over rulers. The friends of peace therefore must exert their influence chiefly in every such country, through the medium of EDUCATION.