guard the innocent against suffering with the guilty! Each party makes a law for itself, erects its own tribunal of blood, and then proceeds to act as accuser and witness, as counsel, judge and executioner. What a burlesque on all ideas of justice! Justice by the process of twenty, fifty, or a hundred thousand professional cut-throats, the very bloodhounds, of society, meeting on a field of battle to shoot, and stab, and hew, and trample each other down! What an outrage on common sense to call this a judicial process, a mode of redress for national grievances! As well might we call a fight between two madmen, or a dozen jackals, a process of justice! SECTION II. INFLUENCES THAT STILL SUPPORT THE CUSTOM OF WAR. EVERY argument for war is a prop to the custom, a plea or apology for its continuance; but, besides the direct arguments in its favor already refuted, we wish to dwell on some of those general influences which are most effectual in upholding this relic of a barbarous paganism. War is an inheritance from other times, the bloody legacy of more than a hundred generations; and during the lapse of all past ages, has it been gathering influences to strengthen and perpetuate its terrible reign. Antiquity is all in its favor; and the ever-flowing stream of time has worn out for it a channel too broad and deep to be easily changed. Incorporated in every form of government, wrought into the texture of all society, imbedded in the strongest passions of our nature, indentifying with itself the sanctities of religion, and enlisting in its own behalf the prejudices of universal and immemorial usage, we cannot wonder at the iron grasp of this custom upon the mind of the world, and the exceeding difficulty of its abolition. This difficulty is much increased by the general mode of reasoning on the subject. Men do not treat war as they do other forms of sin, nor hold nations subject to the same obligations that confessedly rest upon individuals and minor communities. War is a kind of moral outlaw, and scorns all restraints. It is a priveleged wrong-doer, and acknowledges no responsibility to man or to God for its gigantic, wholesale crimes. On this subject government is supposed to be exempt from the general rules of right; nor may we apply to it here the authority of God, or the reason of men, the precepts of religion, the principles of morality, or the dictates of common sense; but must in war support our rulers, right or wrong. nor ever allow ourselves to inquire whether they are right. Thus is war put almost beyond the reach of those influences which suffice for the removal of ordinary evils. "One of the chief obstacles to the extinction of war," says Chalmers, "is a sentiment whichs seems to be universally gone into, that the rules and promises of the gospel which apply to a single individual, do not apply to a nation of individuals. Just think of the mighty effect it would have on the politics of the world, were this sentiment to be practically deposed from its wonted authority over the counsels and the doings of nations, in their transactions with each other. If forbearance be the virtue of an individual, forbearance is also the virtue of a nation. If it be incumbent on men in honor to prefer each other, it is incumbent on the very largest societies of men, through the constituted organ of their gov ernment, to do the same. If it be the glory of a man to defer his anger, and to pass over a transgression, that nation mistakes its glory, which is so feelingly alive to the slightest insult, and musters up its threats and its armaments upon the faintest shadow of a provocation. If it be the magnanimity of an injured man to abstain from vengeance, and if by so doing, he heaps coals of fire upon the head of his enemy, then that is the magnanimous nation, which, recoiling from violence and from blood, will do no more than send its Christian embassy, and prefer its mild and impressive remonstrance; and that is the disgraced nation, which will refuse the impressiveness of the moral appeal that has been made to it." Another guaranty for the continuance of this custom, is found in the general apathy and want of reflection on the subject. Most men neither know, nor care to know, much about it. They let it alone, as a thing with which they have little or nothing to do. They are too ignorant even to feel their need of information, and will neither read nor hear. They seldom reflect upon it, and hardly dream of applying to it the common principles of morality, or the teachings of Christ and his apostles. Even of educated men, not one in ten thoroughly understands it; while the mass of the community have not yet learned the alphabet of this vast and momentous theme. The custom has been a sort of torpedo to the minds of most men, and paralyzed them into a lazy, sleepy assent to its continuance. Hence a general lack of information upon it serves to keep up the custom. If men only knew what it is, and what it does; if they were well acquainted with the enormity of its guilt, and the countless multitude of its evils; if they duly considered how it has deluged the earth with blood, and crime, and misery for more than five thousand years; if they could realize that Christendom alone has wasted in war blood enough to re-people the whole earth, and treasure enough to purchase every foot of its surface thrice over; if they would bear in mind that we ourselves have expended upon the war-system some five or six times as much as for all other governmental purposes put together; if they would just reflect how a war in actual progress suspends commerce, and cripples every department of gainful industry, and loads the nation with enormous debts, and sweeps away the bone and sinew of its population to feed this insatiate Moloch, and sends the voice of lamentation and sorrow into thousands of bereaved families, and demoralizes the whole community, and pours over it a flood of intemperance, vice and crime; -if men would only make and keep themselves familiar with such facts, could they tolerate this custom much longer? It is, however, upheld by a variety of misconceptions still prevalent even among good, well-informed men. How many of them suppose that the evil is incurable for the present; that war is inevitable, like earthquakes, and as necessary, now and then, as occasional storms; that society cannot exist, or its highest welfare be secured, without the war-system; that patriotism, morality and religion itself require or permit the custom; that even the God of Peace, the common Father of all, has authorized nations to engage at will in this work of wholesale robbery, murder and vengeance; that the gospel itself, heaven's own charter and pledge of ultimate peace to the world, does not forbid a custom which contravenes its whole spirit, and tramples in the dust every one of its distinctive principles; but the custom, as a guardian of right, an avenger of wrong, and an outlet of fierce, lawless passions, must be tolerated until the millennium comes. How fatally must such misconceptions tend to grapple upon the bosom of humanity this mammoth incubus of guilt and misery! The chief agencies of society are giving countenance and currency to such delusions as these. The fireside and the school-room, the pulpit and the press, the forum, the senate and the ballot-box, all have hitherto conspired for the most part to uphold, to spread and perpetuate them. What Mark especially how the mass of every community are educated on this subject. It is a war education. Look at the usual training of the young. are the toys of children? Toys of war. pictures do they most frequently see and admire? Pictures of war and warriors. What songs did they use most commonly to hear? Songs of war. Whom are they still taught to hold in the highest admiration? Heroes, men of blood. What books are now most generally, most eagerly read by the young? g? Tales, real or fictitious, of war and warriors. Do parents, even Christian parents, carefully guard their own children against the manifold delusions of this custom? Alas! they talk before their little ones, ere the dawn of reason or conscience, about the glories of war, the trade of human butchery, and train them, with scarce a thought of what they are doing, to look upon it as the great theatre of man's noblest deeds! The surest means are taken to dazzle and delude their young minds in its favor. When a company of gayly-dressed soldiers are passing through the street, the children who are old enough, go forth to gaze on the pageantry, and the mother takes even her babe to the window, that he may inhale with his first breath a bewitching fondness for war The glowing canvass, and the breathing marble, and the glittering sword, and |