impossible. But independent of private accounts, we have various reports from the authorities of towns, villages and provinces, complaining of the atrocities committed by the lawless soldiery. Peaceful peasants were hunted for mere sport, like the beasts of the forest; citizens were nailed up against doors and walls, and fired at like targets; while horsemen and Croats tried their skill at striking off the heads of young children at a blow! Ears and noses were cut off, eyes were scooped out, and the most horrible tortures contrived to extract money from the sufferers, or to make them disclose where property was concealed! Women were exposed to every species of indignity; they were collected in bands, and driven, like slaves, into the camps of the ruffian soldiery; and men had to fly from their homes to escape witnessing the dishonor to which their wives and daughters were subjected!

Houses and villages were burnt out of mere wantonness, and the wretched inhabitants too often forced into the flames, to be consumed along with their dwellings. Amid these scenes of horror, intemperance, dissipation and profligacy were carried to the highest pitch. The peasants, expelled from their homes, enlisted with their oppressors to inflict upon others the sufferings which they had themselves been made to endure. The fields were allowed to run waste; and the absence of industry on one side, added to destruction on the other, soon produced famine, which, as usual, brought infectious and pestilential diseases in its train. In 1635 there were not hands enough left at Schweidnitz to bury the dead, and the town of Ohlau had lost its last citizen! In many places hunger had overcome all repugnance to human flesh; and the tales of cannibalism handed down to us, are far too horrible to be repeated. Forests sprung up over entire dis

tricts, which had been in full cultivation before the war; and wolves and other beasts of prey prowled alone over the deserted haunts of men."

PART II.

MORAL EVILS OF WAR.

CHAPTER I.

MORAL ELEMENTS OF WAR.

井

WAR is not an abstraction, but a terrible reality. We must take it as we find it in fact; and, if we would ascertain its real character, we must analyze its moral elements, as the measure of its actual turpitude. We may perhaps theorize war into comparative innocence; but its principles, its practice, and invariable results, will ever give the lie to such theories, and prove the custom a tissue of wickedness and misery.

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War is purely, intensely selfish. A nation fights, not for the welfare of its enemies, nor for the general good of mankind, but for its own pride, ambition, or other interests. Individuals may be disinterested; but nations have little regard for the brotherhood of their race. They commonly act on the principle of a base, all-engrossing selfishness, and glory in it as the very acme of their aspirations. "A statesman," says Channing, "is expected to take advantage of the weaknesses and wants of other

countries. How loose a morality governs the intercourse of states! What falsehoods and intrigues are licensed by diplomacy! What nation regards another with true friendship? What nation makes sacrifices to another's good? What nation is as anxious to perform its duties, as to assert its rights? What nation chooses to suffer wrong, rather than to inflict it? What nation lays down the everlast ing law of right, casts itself fearlessly on its princi ples, and chooses to be poor, or to perish, rather than to do wrong? Can communities so selfish, so unfriendly, so uprincipled, so unjust, be expected to wage righteous wars? Especially if with this selfishness are joined national prejudices, antipathies, and exasperated passions, what else can be expected in the public policy but inhumanity and crime?"

War is, also, an instrument of great practical injustice. It has no real criterion of right. It proposes to determine justice by an appeal not to reason, or law, or competent, impartial umpires, but to the blind, brutal arbitrament of the sword. When a point of honor, or a claim for indemnity, or a question of boundary, is in dispute, war sets a few hundred thousand men, who know no cause of quarrel between themselves, to cutting each others' throats in order to settle the controversy; and, after continuing this mutual butchery awhile, the parties, as the only way to a satisfactory adjustment, stop fighting and dispatch plenipotentiaries to negotiate a treaty of peace, generally on the principle of put ting everything back, as far as possible, in the same state as before the conflict began.

Nor do the evils of war fall upon its guilty abettors. A few rulers of one nation get into a quarrel with those of another, and then set the people of both to blowing out each others' brains, destroying each others' property, and inflicting the greatest

possible amount of reciprocal mischief and misery. If the real authors of war would themselves do the fighting, pay the expenses, and endure all the suf fering, humanity could afford to witness now and then the spectacle of so righteous a retribution upon the titled madmen who kindle the strife of nations; but these giants of crime, carefully keeping themselves aloof from the deluge of evils they have opened upon the people, merely "cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war. They go not to the war themselves, except as officers with enormous salaries, and then fight their country's battles very much as Napoleon fought the battle of Waterloo-with his spy-glass two miles off! The people are the chief, almost the only sufferers from war. It is their blood that is poured out like water, their property that is squandered or destroyed by millions, their cities and villages that are laid in ashes, their families that are butchered or beggared, their sinews that are taxed through all coming time to pay for these games of blood played by rulers solely for their own gratification or emolument. There is not on earth such a system of popular injustice, oppression and outrage.

Well does Dr. Johnson say, "If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might then enjoy his gains without envy; but, at the conclusion of a ten years' war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose pala. ces rise like exhalations? These are the men who, without virtue, labor or hazard, grow rich as their country is impoverished. They rejoice when obsti nacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and

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devastation, and laugh from their desks at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or a tempest."

Dean Swift's definition of a soldier holds the

mirror up to war. "A soldier," says he, “is a being hired to kill, in cold blood, as many as he possibly can of his own species who have never injured him." Equally just is Voltaire's scorching sarcasm: "A genealogist sets forth to a prince, that he is descended from a count whose kindred, three or four hundred years ago, had made a family compact with a house, the memory of which is now extinguished. That house had some distant claim to a province; and hereupon the prince and his council resolve, that this province belongs to him of divine right. The province itself protests it does not even know him; but he insists that his right is incontestable. So he instantly picks up a multitude who have nothing to do, and nothing to lose, clothes them in coarse blue cloth, puts on them hats bound with coarse white worsted, makes them turn to the right and left, and thus marches them away to glory! Other princes, on hearing of this armament, take part in it, to the best of their ability, and soon cover a small extent of country with more hireling murderers than Jenghiz-khan, Tamerlane and Bajazet had at their heels. And these multitudes furiously murder one another, not only without having any concern in the quarrel, but without so much as knowing what it is about!"

Nor is Leigh Hunt's account of the matter less true to the life: "Two nations, or, most likely, two governments, have a dispute; they reason the point backwards and forwards; they cannot determine it, perhaps do not wish to determine it; so, like two