despatched by a dreadful blow from the butt-end of a musket. When we reached Cordova again, the infuriated populace rushed like tigers upon us, plucked individuals here and there from the ranks, and literally cut them to pieces, and then gazed with savage exultation on their convulsive, agonizing throes!

'We were next marched toward the coast; but our numbers thinned rapidly. Fatigue and insufficient provision rendered many incapable of renewing their march after a night's halt; and dawn exhibited to us the stiffened limbs of such as death had released from their sufferings. The survivors were gaunt and emaciated; and frequently would a poor fellow drop down in the extremity of weariness and despair. No effort was made to relieve these sufferers; but they were either left behind to perish, or bayonetted on the spot.

At length we arrived at St. Lucar, and were thrown, some of us into prison-ships, and others into stinking casements. The extremity of our anguish now exceeded all powers of description. With scarce strength to crawl to our detestable dungeons, many reached them only to lie down, and die broken-hearted. Unwholesome and distasteful bread, about four ounces of horsebeans, and a little rancid oil, formed the materials of our wretched fare, so wretched as to be refused in many cases by men fainting with weariness and famished with hunger.

'From St. Lucar we were sent to Cadiz, some on foot, and oth-. ers by water. I was among the latter; and, as soon as we had got on board the vessels, we were counted like so many cattle driven into their stables. Each place of rest was made to contain six men; and, when once laid upon our backs, we had no room to change our position right or left, and the pestilential effluvia, arising from so many bodies thus huddled together, was extremely offensive, and rendered the atmosphere of the ship quite putrid. Vermin were generated by thousands; and such was the climax of my wretchedness and disgust, that I earnestly implored the intervention of the destroying angel; and a great many of my companions, harassed by the unrelenting severity of our masters, sought refuge from their misery by plunging into the sea.

'Nor did our changes stop here. From Cadiz we were sent to Majorca, and thence to the desolate island of Cabrera, where we were reduced for a time to the necessity of feeding on grass, and even on the dust of the earth. A great many died; and we immediately buried them in the sea, under the horrible apprehension, that the presence of their bodies would rouse within us the savage longings of the cannibal. A cuirassier was actually killed for this purpose by a Pole, who confessed he had done the same to two others of his comrades.'

No kindness or skill can avert suffering from the victims of war. 'For ten days after the sea-fight of Trafalgar, men were employed in bringing the wounded ashore; and spectacles were hourly exhibited at the wharves, and through the streets, sufficient to shock every heart not yet hardened to scenes of blood and

human suffering. When by the carelessness of the boatmen, or the surging of the sea, the boats struck against the stone piers, a horrid cry, piercing the very soul, arose from the mangled wretches on board. Nor was the scene less affecting on the tops of the pier, where the wounded were being carried away to the hospitals in every shape of misery, whilst crowds of Spaniards either assisted, or looked on with signs of horror. Meanwhile their com panions who had escaped unhurt, walked up and down with folded arms and down-cast eyes, whilst women sat on heaps of arms, broken furniture and baggage, with their heads bent between their knees. I had no inclination to follow the litters of the wounded; yet I learned that every hospital in Cadiz was already full, and the convents and churches were appropriated to the remainder.'

Sir Charles Bell, the eminent surgeon who was present in the hospitals after the battle of Waterloo, says 'the wounded French continued to be brought in for several days; and the British soldiers who had in the morning been moved by the piteous cries of those they carried, I saw in the evening so hardened by the repetition of the scene, and by fatigue, as to become indifferent to the sufferings they occasioned.

'It was now the thirteenth day after the battle. It is impossible to conceive the sufferings of men rudely carried at such a period of their wounds. When I first entered the hospital, these Frenchmen had been roused and excited in a degree quite extraordinary; and in the glance of their eyes there was a character of fierceness which I never expected to witness in the human countenance. On the second day, the temporary excitement had subsided; and, turn which way I might, I encountered every form of entreaty from those whose condition left no need of words to stir compassion. Surgeon Major, oh, how I suffer! Dress my wounds-do dress my wounds!-Doctor, cut off my leg! Oh! I suffer too much!" And when these entreaties were unavailing, you might hear in a weak, inward voice of despair, "I shall die—I am a dead man!” i

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The following sketch from a British officer in Portugal will help us still further to conceive the horrors of a hospital. 'I entered the town of Mirando Cervo about dusk. It had been a black, grim, gloomy sort of day. Huge masses of clouds lay motionless on the sky; and then they would break up suddenly as with a whirlwind, and roll off in the red and bloody distance. I felt myself in a strange sort of excitement; my imagination got the better of all my other faculties; and, while walking out in the principal street, I met a woman, an old haggard-looking wretch, who had in her hollow eyes an unaccountable expression of cruelty, a glance like that of madness; but her deportment was quiet and rational, and, though clad in squallidness, she was evidently of the middle rank in society. Without being questioned, she told me in broken English, I should find comfortable accommodations in an old convent at some distance in a grove of cork-trees, pointing to them with her long, shrivelled hand and arm, and giving a sort of hysterical laugh.

'I followed her advice, anticipating no danger or adventure; yet the wild eyes, and the still wilder voice of the old crone so powerfully affected me, that I walked, in a sort of muse, up a pretty long flight of steps, and found myself standing at the entrance to the cloisters of the convent. A strange sight now burst upon my view! Before me lay and sat more than a hundred dead bodies, all of them apparently in the very attitude or posture in which they had died. I gazed at them a minute or more before I knew that they were all corpses; and a desperate courage then enabled me to look steadfastly at the scene before me. The bodies were mostly clothed in mats, and rags, and tattered great coats; some of them were merely wrapt round about with girdles composed of straw; and two or three were perfectly naked. Every face had a different expression, but all painful, horrid, agonized, bloodless. Many glazed eyes were wide open; and perhaps this was the most shocking thing in the whole spectacleso many eyes that saw not, all seemingly fixed upon different objects; some cast up to heaven, some looking straight forward, and others with the white orbs turned round, and deep sunk in their sockets. It was a sort of hospital; and these wretched beings, nearly all desperately wounded, had been stripped by their comrades, and left there either dead, or to die.

This ghastly sight I had begun to view with some composure, when I saw, at the remotest part of the hospital, a gigantic figure sitting, all covered with blood, and almost naked, upon a rude bedstead, with his back_leaning against the wall, and his eyes fixed directly on mine. I first thought him alive, and shuddered; but he was stone dead! In his last agonies he had bitten his under lip almost entirely off, and his long black beard was drenched in clotted gore, that likewise lay in large blots upon his shaggy bosom. One of his hands had convulsively grasped the woodwork of the bedstead, and crushed it in the grasp. I recognized the corpse. He was a sergeant in a grenadier regiment, and had, during the retreat, been distinguished for acts of savage valor. One day he killed with his own hand Harry Warburton, the righthand man of my own company, perhaps the most powerful man in the British army. There sat the giant frozen to death. I went up to him, and, raising his brawny arm, it fell down again with a hollow sound against the bloody side of the corpse.

'My eyes unconsciously wandered along the walls. They were covered with grotesque figures and caricatures of the English, absolutely drawn in blood! Horrid blasphemies, and the most shocking obscenities in the shape of songs, were in like manner written there. I observed two books lying on the floor, and picked them up. One was full of the most hideous obscenity; the other was the Bible! It is impossible to tell the horror produced in me by this circumstance. The books dropt from my hand, and fell on the breast of one of the bodies-it was a woman's breast! Yes, a woman had lived and died in such a place as this! What had been in that now still, death-cold heart, perhaps only a few hours

before, I knew not-possibly love strong as death; love, guilty, abandoned, linked by vice unto misery, but still love that perished only with the last throb, and yearned in its last convulsion towards some one of these grim dead bodies.

Near this corpse lay that of a perfect boy not more than seventeen years of age. Round his neck was suspended, by a chain of hair, a little copper figure of the Virgin Mary, and in his hand was a letter in French. I glanced at it, and read enough to know it was from a mother-My dear Son, &c. It was a terrible place to think of mother-of home-of any social, any human ties. What! have these ghastly things parents, brothers, sisters, lovers? Were they once all happy in peaceful homes? Did these convulsed, bloody, mangled bodies ever lie in undisturbed beds? Did these clutched hands once press in infancy a mother's breast? Now, alas, how loathsome, terrible, ghostlike! Will such creatures, thought I, ever live again? Robbers, ravishers, incendiaries, murderers, suicides-a dragoon there had obviously blown out his own brains-here is a very pandemonium of guilt and horror!'

Such are the illustrations of war in the heart of Christendom itself at the dawn of the nineteenth century! Are they like the gospel-like its spirit, its principles, its promised results? Are such woes, such atrocities and horrors necessary, inevitable? Must they continue even in Christendom forever? Need they ever be repeated again under the blessed light of revelation? Is there not power in the gospel, God's own panacea for all human ills, to prevent it? Most certainly; and all we need is a right application of its pacific principles. Here is a sovereign remedy for war; but, like every other remedy, it must be applied before it can cure, and it is the business of Christians to apply it wherever the evil is found. Who else will make the application? Has not the Prince of Peace devolved this duty upon them as peculiarly, emphatically their own? Will they not then array themselves as one man against a sin so foul, a scourge so terrible? Are you willing that such evils should ever befall your country, and your own father or brothers, your own husband or sons, should be doomed to similar cruelties and sufferings? If not, gird yourself in earnest for the work of putting an end to war first in Christendom, and finally through the world. Means are just as indispensable in this cause as in any other; but, if used aright, the God of Peace is pledged to crown them in due time with complete

success.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS.

SAFETY OF PACIFIC PRINCIPLES.

THERE are two ways to keep men from injuring us-by compulsion, or persuasion; by brute force, or kind moral influence; by appeals to their fears alone, or addresses to their conscience and better feelings. We may resort to the law of violence, or the law of love; we may rely on the principle of war, or the principle of peace. One threatens, the other persuades; one hates and curses, the other loves and blesses; the former gives back insult and injury with interest, while the latter meekly turns the other cheek to the smiter, forgives even its bitterest enemies, and strives to overcome evil only with good.

No man, at all acquainted with the gospel, needs to be told which of these methods is most accordant with its principles. The bare statement must suffice for any one who has read either the New Testament or the Old; who has traced the example of Christ and his Apostles, or caught from their lips such instructions as these,-lay aside all malice; do good unto all men; love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and do good to them that despitefully use you; resist not evil, but whoso smiteth you on one cheek, turn to him the other also; recompense to no man evil for evil, but overcome evil with good.

Here is the Christian mode of preventing or curing evils; but most persons deem it unsafe, and resort to some form of violence. They have little confidence in the power of reason or truth, of justice or kindness, to hold in check the bad passions of mankind; but employ for this purpose threats of evil, and engines of vengeance and death. Fear they seem to regard as the only effectual restraint upon mischief or guilt; and hence they arm themselves with pistols and daggers against their personal foes, and think it madness for nations to rely for protection, one against another, on any thing but fleets and armies, a soldiery well trained, and fortifications well manned, Milder means, appeals to the better feelings of our nature, they would not entirely discard; but the former they make their last resort, their sole reliance, and honestly believe that war is the only sure way to peace; that there is no real security but in bloodshed; that we must either fight, or become the prey of malice or ambition, of rapacity or revenge. Nor can we deny that the history of our world, written mainly in blood, and detailing a series of almost incessant jealousies and conflicts between nations, would seem to justify such an opinion; and yet we verily believe that pacific principles are the surest safeguard, and would, if rightly used, suffice, far better than any war-methods, to avert or mitigate the evils incident from bad passions to individual or national intercourse.

P. T. NO. XL.