per cent., makes his will on an eight-pound stamp, and expires in the arms of an apothecary who has paid a license of a hundred pounds for the privilege of putting him to death. His whole property is immediately taxed from two to ten per cent. Besides the probate, large fees are demanded for burying him in the chancel; his virtues are handed down to posterity on taxed marble; and then he is gathered to his fathers-to be taxed no more."

A The condition of Holland is still worse. In 1840 her debt was 800,000,000 German dollars; an average of $266 to each inhabitant. Her solvency is very doubtful; for her expenses since 1830 have almost invariably exceeded her income. The Dutch have tried every expedient to extricate themselves, reducing the perquisites of royalty so low as to make their king little more than a burgomaster, and paring down their protective duties so as to secure the largest possible amount of revenue; yet, after all, bankruptcy is staring them in the face. What a catastrophe for a nation that once stood at the head of the commerce of the world!

Europe, as a whole, has of late been gradually paying off her war debts; but in 1840, they amounted to some TEN THOUSAND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS; an average of about fifty dollars to every inhabitant; the bare interest upon which, at five per cent., would be $500,000,000 a year. The annual cost of her war system to all Christendom, including interest on her war-debts, cannot fall much short of $1,000,000,000.

What a maelstrom of the world's wealth has war been! Give back all the property it has wasted from the first, and the interest alone would suffice, ere long to make the whole earth a second Eden; to build a palace for every one of her nobles, and provide luxuries for all her now famished and suffering

poor; to spread over her entire surface a complete network of canals and railways; to beautify every one of her cities, beyond all ancient or modern example, with works of art and genius; to support all her governments, and give a church to every village, a school to every neighborhood, and a Bible to every family. "Give me the money that has been spent in war, and I will purchase every foot of land upon the globe; I will clothe every man, woman and child in an attire that kings and queens would be proud of; I will build a school-house upon every hill-side, and in every valley over the whole habitable earth, and will supply that school-house with a competent teacher; I will build an academy in every town, and endow it; I will establish a college in every state, and fill it with able professors; I will crown every hill with a church, consecrated to the promulgation of the gospel of peace, and will support in its pulpit an able teacher of righteousness, so that on every Sabbath morning the chime on one hill should answer to the chime on another, round the earth's broad circumference; and the voice of prayer, and the song of praise, should ascend like an universal holocaust to heaven." There is no end to calculations like these. All the contributions of modern benevolence are scarce a drop of the bucket in comparison with what is continually wasted for war-purposes. We stared at the first suggestion of a railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific; but a single year's cost of the war-system to Christendom would build that road, and two more round the globe!

CHAPTER II.

LOSS OF LIFE BY WAR.

THE chief aim of war is the destruction of human life; and, in order to ascertain how far it accomplishes this fell purpose, we must consider, first, how it prevents the increase of mankind, and, next, how it actually destroys them.

but

We cannot dwell on the thousand ways in which war prevents the salutary growth of our species. The general poverty which it creates, must tend to hold back the mass of the community from marriage. Virtue is the chief nurse of population; this custom is a hot-bed of vice and crime. It reeks with licentiousness; and every one knows that such habits in a community are fatal to the increase of its members, and often suffice alone to insure, as in the South-Sea Islands, a steady and rapid diminution. Its stern exigencies forbid in most cases the marriage of its agents; and the great body of them become reckless libertines, whose intrigues debauch more or less every community they visit. There is no record of their countless victims; but the effect in war-countries is seen in the fact, that in Paris every third child is a bastard. In some European countries, no man is permitted to marry until he has served in the army a long term of years; and during this time, the common soldiers indulge in the loosest debaucheries, and the officers live on a species of tolerated concubinage. Hence ensues such a general relaxation of morals and domestic ties, as must greatly diminish the number of law

ful marriages, and the growth of a legitimate and virtuous population.

The general result you may see in war countries, compared with those which have pursued a pacific policy. Such has been our own policy; and in fifty years we have quadrupled our population. Such has been the policy of China; and, with a territory equal to little more than one-third of Europe, she has more than one third of all the people on the globe. While our own population was doubling every quarter of a century, that of Europe, according to Adam Smith, was increasing at a rate so slow as hardly to reach the same result in five hundred years; but since the downfall of Napoleon, the inhabitants of Prussia have been doubling in 26 years, those of Great Britain in 42, those of Russia in 66, and those of France in 105. During this period of general peace, (1846,) the population of Europe, with the exception of Spain and Portugal rent with civil wars, has probably increased more than in any two centuries before for a thousand years. The sum total of prevention from war, we cannot of course estimate or even conjecture; but, had this custom never existed, there might hitherto have been full twice as many human beings on the globe, with four times the amount of happiness.

War also introduces a variety of customs destructive to life. It has written the code of even some Christian states in blood. In England itself there were, in the time of Blackstone, no less than 160 crimes punishable with death; and in the reign of Henry VIII., there perished by the hands of the executioner 72,000 persons! War, likewise, originated duelling, judicial combats, and other practices which have swept off immense multitudes. In certain departments of France, five, six, and even ten per cent. of all the deaths in the army have

some years been occasioned by duelling, that spawn of the war system!

But the immediate destruction of life by war, is vast and appalling. Contemplate the thousands and millions of its agents-bold, blood-thirsty and reckless, trained with all possible skill to the trade of human butchery, armed for this purpose with instruments the most terribly effective, plying every art, and stretching every nerve to destroy mankind, and stimulated to desperation by the promise to success of the highest earthly rewards; and can you adequately conceive the havoc likely to ensue?

Mark the incidental loss of life. In transferring troops from one country to another, especially to sultry regions, statesmen coolly calculate on losing every third man! In certain climates, and under certain circumstances in every climate, it requires only a few brief years or even months of hardship, exposure and disease, to annihilate whole crews or regiments without shedding a drop of blood.

Let us quote a single instance of the fatal effect of climate. "The climate," says Lord Collingwood, "was deadly, and no constitution could resist its effects. At San Juan," near the Isthmus of Darien, "I joined the ship, and succeeded Lord Nelson, who was promoted to a larger ship; but he had received the infection of the climate before he went from the port, and had a fever from which he did not recover until he quitted his ship, and went to England. My constitution resisted many attacks, and I survived most of my ship's company, having buried, in four months, one hundred and eighty of the two hundred that composed it ;" a loss of ninety per cent. from the climate alone! "Nor was mine a singular case; for every ship that was long there, suffered in the same degree. The transports' men all died; and some of the ships, having none left to