work of unutterable horror. The blood, the agony, the groans which follow, are nothing. It is the raging fires of hatred, anger, revenge, and furious passion, which nerve every arm, and boil in every heart, and with which thousands upon thousands pour into the presence of their Maker-these constitute the real horrors of a battle-field."

Let us, also, learn the spirit of war from its own rules. Suwarrow's catechism, a series of directions by that great general to his soldiers, says, "Push hard with the bayonet. The ball will lose its way; the bayonet never. The ball is a fool; the bayonet a hero. Stab once; and off with the Turk from the bayonet. Stab the second. Stab the third. A hero will stab half a dozen. If three attack you, stab the first, fire on the second, and bayonet the third." Lord Nelson, the military idol of England, gave to his midshipmen the following directions, as the essence of their duties: "There are three things which you are constantly to bear in mind— first, you must always implicitly obey orders without attempting to form any opinion of your own respecting their propriety; secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and, thirdly, you must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil."

War, indeed, is a system of well-nigh unrestrained, illimitable wickedness. It tramples under foot all laws, human and divine. It knows no rule save the will of its leaders, or the impulse of its own wild, ferocious passions. It is the perfection of moral anarchy, such as makes outlaws on earth, and fiends in hell. It confounds or annihilates nearly all moral distinction. It dethrones the divinity of right, and puts in its place the war-demon of violence and outrage, lust and crime. It spurns every restraint, and claims to do just what it pleases.. "We'll fight

now, right or wrong," was the reckless, savage shout of our troops, as they rushed down the great valley of the West to invade Mexico, and revel in the halls of the Montezumas. Commodore Decatur, long ago, gave the toast-"Our country! may she always be right; but, right or wrong, may she always be victorious;" a sentiment which has since been abbreviated into the maxim—our country, right or wrong! The rabble have translated this watchword of wholesale crime into still briefer and more vigorous, as well as more vulgar Saxon-GO IT BLIND! 'When your country is at war, shut your eyes to the question whether she is right or wrong, help her to fight out the quarrel, however wicked, and hold yourself ready to do any deeds of atrocity which the men in power, though ever so selfish, unprincipled and reckless, may require at your hands.' Is it possible to conceive, on earth or in hell, a principle worse than this? Yet such a principle is essential to war, and thus brands the custom as a tissue of outrages upon the first principles of religion, morality, and social order.

But let us look at the actual spirit of war as seen in its agents. Just before the battle of Barossa, in Spain, Gen. Graham, riding in front of his troops, and waving his hat, pointed to the enemy, and exclaimed, "Now, my lads, there they are! Spare your powder, but give them steel enough!" The soldiers responded in three cheers, and rushed fiercely to the charge. Pagans are not wont to conceal the real malignity of war; and hence Scipio, the commander of the Roman army that destroyed Carthage, prefaced that work of vengeance with this prayer: "O dreadful Pluto! let terror and vengeance loose against the Carthagenians! May the cities and people who have taken up arms against us, be destroyed! To you, O ye Furies, I devote

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all the enemies of my republic." Of this spirit, the battle of Cannæ left a memorable illustration. At its close, a Numidian, still alive, was found lying upon a dead Roman." The nose and ears of the former were miserably torn; for the Roman, having his hands so disabled that he could not use his arms, had risen from anger to fury, and expired in the very act of tearing his enemy with his teeth!

Nor is modern Christian warfare barren of examples equally horrid. We might refer to the thousand Arabs all burnt to death in a cave by the French, so late as 1845, or the wanton, cold-blooded butcheries by the English in China, Scinde, and Affghanistan; but take one or two cases from the French under Napoleon in Egypt. Denon, describing the attack upon Alexandria, says: "We were under the necessity of putting to death all the men at the breach; but the slaughter did not end there. The inhabitants fled to their mosques for protection; and there men and women, old and young, and infants at the breast, were slaughtered! This butchery continued four hours; and yet we might have spared them, by only summoning the town; but it was necessary to begin by confounding our enemy!" In another place he gives a vivid account of their fighting with the Mamelukes. "We are attacked," he says, "in a mass with cries of rage. The cour age is equal on both sides; they are animated by hope, we by indignation. Those who are dismounted, drag themselves under our bayonets, cutting at our soldiers' legs with their sabres; and the dying man summons his last effort to throttle his adver sary! One of our men, lying on the ground, had seized an expiring Mameluke, and begun to strangle him, when an officer said to him, 'How can you, in your condition, do such an act?' 'Why,' replied the dying man, 'you speak much at your ease-you

who are unhurt; but I, who have not long to live, must have some enjoyment while I may!"

Let us come to our own country. In our war with Mexico, Maj. Ringgold, when mortally wounded, spent the last hours of his life in telling "with much pride how he directed his cannon not only to groups and masses of the enemy, but to particular men, and felt as confident of hitting his mark as if he had been using a rifle." He only regretted that he had not men enough to kill more of the Mexicans! Another officer (Page) had his lower jaw so entirely shot away, that he could not speak, yet exulted over the success of our troops in butchering the enemy, and concluded one answer to the inquiries of his friends by writing-We gave the Mexicans hell!

Well might old Burton ask, "Is not this a mad world? Are not these madmen, who leave such memorials of their madness to all succeeding generations? What fury put so brutish a thing as war first into the minds of men? Why should creatures, born to exercise mercy and meekness, so war and rage like beasts rushing on their own destruction? So abominable a thing is war!"

"There is something," says Cecil, "worse than the plunder of the ruffian, than the outrage of the ravisher, than the stab of the murderer. These are comparatively but the momentary evils of war.

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is also a shocking moral appendage which naturally grows out of national conflicts. Instead of listening to the counsels of divine mercy, and concurring in the design of a kingdom of heaven set up on earth in righteousness and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,' the spirit of warlike discord tends to entomb every such idea. It tends rather to set up something like a kingdom of hell, a reign of violence, where destruction is the grand enterprise; where

the means of death and desolation are cultivated as a science; where invention is racked to produce ruin, and the performance of it is ennobled by public applause. Moloch seems once more enthroned; while ambition, revenge and oppression, erect heir banners amidst groans and tears, amidst cities desolated, or smoking in their ashes."

"While the philanthropist," says Robert Hall, "is devising means to mitigate the evils, and augment the happiness of the world, the warrior is revolving in the gloomy recesses of his capacious mind, plans of future devastation and ruin. Prisons crowded with captives, cities emptied of their inhabitants, fields desolate and waste, are among his proudest trophies. The fabric of his fame is cemented with tears and blood; and, if his name is wafted to the ends of the earth, it is in the shrill cry of suffering humanity, in the curses and imprecations of those whom his sword has reduced to despair."

CHAPTER II.

CAUSES OF WAR.

THE moral character of an act is determined by its motives; and Dr. Knox avers, that "the causes of war are, for the most part, such as must disgrace any animal pretending to rationality." Pride or 'ambition, rapacity or revenge, a love of power, or a thirst for blood, a personal pique, or the merest whim, a question of prerogative, or strife about a title or a boundary, a point of etiquette, or the fig. ment of national honor, the assertion of unjust or