This argument, however, we rest not on the strongest facts of the case. We will not now detail the frauds and outrages of our own forefathers on-the sons of the forest; we will not retrace the long train of Spanish wars in North and South America; nor will we review the crusades, or the centuries of fierce, bloody conflict with Mohammedans, or the scores of wars on the shores of Africa, or the southern peninsula of Asia. Leave all these out of view, and come, we do not say to the cold-blooded butcheries of Napoleon on the sands of Syria, but to the atrocities perpetrated in war by nominal Christians upon the heathen in the heart of this very century. Look at our own ruthless, infamous war against the Seminoles in Florida. Go to Scinde or Afghanistan, and there witness from British soldiers rapine, carnage and conflagration at which even a savage might shudder. See Britain, the chief nurse of modern missions, sending her fleets and armies to force the poison of India upon the sons and daughters of China. Hear some of the results from the lips of her own agents in this work of villany and blood. At Amoy, we killed fifteen hundred of the Chinese, with the loss ourselves of only sixteen men. Such a tremendous bombardment as was continued for two hours in a neighborhood so densely populated, must of course have occasioned the most pitiable sights; and at one spot four children were struck down, and the frantic father was seen first embracing their dead bodies, and then attempting to drown himself in a neighboring tank. Numerous scenes like this were witnessed!'

Trace the British in their late crusade against the Afghans. At Ghuznee, a wild fusilade was opened upon them by our troops; and, in the midst of indescribable confusion, the native soldiers, gathering in threes or fours around each Afghan, shot and hunted them down like mad dogs. The scene soon excited feelings of horror, as the Afghans sunk under repeated wounds, and the ground was strewed with bleeding, mangled, heaving carcasses; here ghastly figures stiffly stretched in calm but grim repose, and there the last breath yielded up through clenched teeth in attitudes of despair and defiance, with hard struggles, and muttered impre cations.' At the sacking of Istalif, supposed to contain 14,000 soldiers, Maj. Sanders was engaged for two days in directing the work of destruction; and during this time the place was given over to fire and sword; not a living soul was spared, whether armed or unarmed; the men were hunted down like wild beasts, not a prisoner taken, no mercy dreamt of! Whenever the body of an Afghan was found, the Hindoo Sepoy set fire to his clothes, that the curse of a "burnt father" might rest upon his children; and even the wounded, when found alive, were in this way roasted to death! Cabool, also, with its 60,000 inhabitants one year before, we made a heap of ruins, and left here and at Istalif 80,000 human beings houseless, and without food. We laid waste the country wherever we went, burning the strongholds of the chiefs, and villages of the peasantry, showing no mercy, and giving no quarter to friend or foe, armed or unarmed, open enemies, or professed allies.'

Take another case from China. At Ningpo, the people, hurrying to get out of the city as fast as possible, were crowded in dense masses into the narrow street, where, coming up with our cannon within one hundred yards of them, we poured upon the crowded fugitives so destructive a fire of grape and canister, that we had to remove their dead or wounded bodies to the sides of the street, before our guns could advance; and thus we pursued them for miles with our artillery and bayonets!'

Look now at a case of individual suffering. After we had,' says Capt. Loch, 'forced our way over piles of furniture placed to barricade the door, we entered an open court strewed with rich stuffs, and covered with clotted blood; and upon the steps leading to the great hall, lay in their own gore, two bodies of youthful Tartars, apparently brothers, cold and stiff. Having gained the threshold of their abode, they had fallen from the loss of blood, and died on the spot. Stepping over these bodies, we entered the hall, and met face to face three women seated, a mother and two daughters. At their feet lay two bodies of elderly men, with their throats cut from ear to ear, and their senseless heads resting on the feet of their relations. To the right were two young girls, beautiful and delicate, crouching over a living soldier, and endeavoring thus to conceal him. I stopped, horror-struck at what I saw, and stood spell-bound to the spot. The women must have discovered my feelings; for the expression on the mother's face of cold, unutterable despair, soon changed to the evident workings of scorn and hate, which at last burst forth in a paroxysm of invective, and finally sought relief in floods of tears. Action was the only language she could make intelligible to us; and, coming close to me, she seized me by the arm, and, with clenched fist and deadly frown, pointed to the bodies, to her daughters, to herself, and her yet splendid house. Then she stepped back a pace, closed her hands firmly, and in a hoarse, husky voice spoke, as I could see by her gestures, of her misery, of her hate, and, I doubt not, of revenge. It was a scene one could not bear long. I attempted by signs to explain, and offered my services to pass her in safety through the gates into the open country; but the poor woman would not listen to me, and the whole family were by this time in loud and bitter lamentations.'

What must be the result of all this? The British forces,' says an eye-witness, 'have made Christianity and civilization, in the eyes of the Chinese, synonymous with murder and rapine. Violating women; breaking in pieces monuments of the dead; digging up and mutilating bodies; protecting, with the ships of war, the opium smugglers on the coast; opening the way for them, and for pirates, to Whampoa, and making the settlement of Hong Kong a sink where the filth of China and of Europe run together!' Thus have baptised warriors made the very name of Christianity a hissing, a scorn and a loathing through the pagan world; and the missionary, go where he will, must meet these deep, bitter, almost incurable prejudices against our religion of peace, so strangely belied for fifteen centuries by her warring votaries. Not a sea can

he cross, not a country reach, scarce an island touch, but the wardogs from Christendom have been there before him, to throw in his way obstacles which ages can hardly suffice to remove.

Surely, then, it is high time for the church to remove from Christendom this crying sin and shame. Do you say she cannot? Yes, she can, if she will; for she has in her hands all the power requisite under God for the purpose. Let her come up to this work in earnest; let her put forth upon it her utmost energies; let all her members through the world unite as one man against war; let all her pulpits open their moral batteries upon it; let every press under her control or influence teem with remonstrances against it; let all her schools and all her firesides train the young to hold it in deep, undying abhorrence; let every Christian pray, and talk, and act against it, and utterly refuse it his support or sanction in any way; and not only would there be no more war in Christendom, but the whole system would come to an end ere-long and forever.

Do you still plead that war is an affair of the state, rather than the church? True, the state does wage it; but has the church lent it no aid, no encouragement? Does she never talk of its glories, never train her own sons for its murderous work, never pray to the God of peace for its success, never return him thanks for its blood-drenched victories? Be it then that she cannot alone abolish or prevent war, she certainly can clear her own skirts of its guilt, by solemnly protesting before all men against it as utterly unchristian, and thus compel the whole world henceforth to regard Christianity as no more responsible for the wars of Christendom, than for the idolatries of India, or the cannibalism of New Zealand.

Do you tell us, however, to spread Christianity, and that alone will, while nothing else can, put an end to war? True, if we spread the gospel in its purity, its pacific like its other principles, so as to secure peace equally with repentance and faith; but has the church done this for fifteen hundred years? If so, what mean the centuries of war among her own members, the millions of bayonets even now bristling all over Christendom, or the thousand millions of dollars still wasted every year upon its war-system? Make men such Christians, and they will cease from war! Have they? If so, tell us when and where. Do you say they were Christians only in name? None of them real disciples of Christ? None such now engaged in war, or lending it their countenance? Alas! the archbishop of England stereotyped, to be repeated in all her churches, a solemn form of thanksgiving to God for the very atrocities of which we have here quoted a few specimens from Scinde, Afghanistan and China. Put an end to war by spreading such views of Christianity, a gospel thus bathed in blood, and steeped in pollution! Never. We must weave peace into the actual Christianity of Christendom,before our missionaries will carry peace along with them as one of its fruits. Thus all say of intemperance; and why not of war? So long as the evil was in the bosom of the church; so long as her officers trafficked in the liquid poison for a livelihood; so long as her members, without rebuke, drank it as a

daily beverage; so long as some of her most godly ministers could distil and peddle it for their own support in preaching the gospel, would you have said, spread such a Christianity, and that will stop these drinking usages; make men such Christians, and they will cease from the very practices in which they are now indulging without scruple?

Still perhaps you say, 'the church must not turn aside from her missionary work to the cause of peace.' Turn aside for peace! Why, it lies right in her path, a part of this very work, and quite indispensable to the speedy or ultimate accomplishment of this work. Peace is her first want, the place to stand upon for an effective application of her great moral lever to the world. She must have peace; and her best economy is to make sure of it from the outset. How strange for a man to say he cannot afford a scaffold for the edifice he is erecting! So poor he cannot stop long enough to eat, or spend an hour in quenching a fire that would soon lay in ashes the earnings of his whole life! The church cannot spare the time or the money requisite for the cause of peace! A vigorous, decisive support of this cause would be the best economy she has ever practised even for her missionary work. It has been said by wise, cool-headed men, that a war between us and England might put back the world's conversion a whole century; yet could the Christians in these two countries prevent such a war with one half the effort they expend on the missionary cause in a single year. In no other way could a part of our money be spent to better purpose even for this cause; and hence the church should contribute, and her wealthy members leave legacies, for peace just as they do for missions.

What a world of evil has been prevented, how vast an amount of good secured, by God's blessing on the little already done in the cause of peace! Hardly a thousand dollars a year were given to this cause in our own country during the first twenty-five years from its origin, and probably not more than four thousand a year from all Christendom; and yet has this pittance sufficed materially to change the international policy of the civilized world, and preserve its general peace ever since the overthrow of Napoleon; a result as truly owing under God to the cause of peace, as the triumphs of temperance are to that cause, or the spread of the gospel to the missionary enterprise. In what way could the same amount of money have done more good, or contributed more to the world's evangelization? To this glorious result peace is indispensable; and in vain, so long as the war-cancer is gnawing her own vitals, or the war-system of Christendom is resting like a mammoth incubus on her bosom, and leaving its bloodprints on the banners of her cross, will the church wait for the coming of that era when the kingdoms of this world shall all become the kingdom of our Lord, and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig-tree, with none to molest or make him afraid.'

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS.

CAUSES OF WAR.

BY JONATHAN DYMOND.

In attempting to form an accurate estimate of the moral character of human actions and opinions, it is often of importance to inquire how they have been produced. There is always great reason to doubt the rectitude of that of which the causes and motives are impure; and if, therefore, some of the motives to war, and of its causes, are inconsistent with reason or with virtue, Í would invite the reader to pursue his inquiries on this subject with suspicion at least of the rectitude of our ordinary opinions.

There are some customs which have obtained so generally and so long, that what was originally an effect becomes a cause, and what was a cause becomes an effect, until, by the reciprocal influence of each, the custom is continued by circumstances so multiplied and involved, that it is difficult to detect them in all their ramifications, or to determine those to which it is principally to be referred. What were once the occasions of wars, may be easily supposed. Robbery, or the repulsion of robbers, was probably the only motive to hostility, until robbery became refined into ambition, and it was sufficient to produce a war, that a chief was not content with the territory of his fathers; but by the gradually increasing complication of society from age to age, and by the multiplication of remote interests and obscure rights, the motives to war have become so numerous and so technical, that ordinary observation often fails to perceive what they are. They are sometimes known only to a cabinet, which is influenced in its decision by reasonings of which a nation knows little, or by feelings of which it knows nothing; so that of those who personally engage in hostilities, there is perhaps not often one in ten who can distinctly tell why he is fighting.

This refinement in the motives of war is no trifling evidence that they are insufficient or bad. When it is considered how tremendous a battle is, how many it hurries in a moment from the world, how much wretchedness and how much guilt it produces, it would surely appear that nothing but obvious necessity should induce us to resort to it. But when, instead of a battle, we have a war with many battles, and of course with multiplied sufferings and accumulated guilt, the motives to so dreadful a measure ought to be such as to force themselves upon involuntary observation, and to be written, as it were, in the skies. If, then, a large pro

*This and the four following articles or tracts contain the substance of all that Dymond wrote on the subject of Peace and War, mainly as abridged by himself in his Principles of Morality, but with a few additions from his somewhat fuller Inquiry into the accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity-AM. ED.

P. T. NO. LVII.