the Spanish succession, $162,500,000; in the Spanish war, $145,000,000; in the Seven Years' war, $300,000,000; in the American war, $520,000,000; in the French Revolutionary war, $1,005,000,000. During seven wars, lasting in all sixty-five years, she borrowed $4,170,000,000, and raised by taxes $5,949,000,000; making a total expenditure of $10,115,000,000! It has been estimated, that England spent about ten thousand millions merely in wars undertaken first to humble the Bourbons, and then to restore them to the throne which Napoleon had usurped.

*

Glance at the financial history of such a warlike nation as England, and mark the unbounded prodigality of war. Her average revenue during the reign of the Norman kings, was £300,000; under the Plantagenets, or Saxon line, £133,017; under the house of Lancaster, only £80,026; during that of York, £100,000; under that of Tudor, £510,000. During the entire reign of George I., there came into the treasury of Great Britain only £79,832,160, or a very little more than in the single year of 1815; during that of his successor, £217,217,301, of which he spent £157,000,000 in three wars; and during that of George III., there was expended no less than £1,386,268,446, more than $6,000,000,000, three times as much as all the coin on the globe at the time of its greatest abundance in 1809. From 1797 to 1817, twenty years, England borrowed $2,160,000,000, and raised by taxes 86,192,866,066; in all, $8,352,866,066, or an average for the twenty years of $1,143,444 every day, and more than a million of this for war!

War has loaded all Europe with debts. It is impossible to ascertain their precise amount; but in 1829, that of Prussia was said to be $133,000,000; that of Russia, $158,000,000; that of Spain, $315,000,000; that of Austria, $351,000,000; that of Netherlands, $668,000,000; that of France, $874,000,000; while that of England in 1815 was $4,395,000,000. We do not know how nearly the above sums exhibit the present war-debts of these countries; but the sum total now resting on Europe alone, cannot be much, if any, less than ten thousand millions of dollars, or five times as much as all the coin in the world!

What a maelstrom to engulph the riches of the world! All the public property of England was estimated in 1833

*We have here multiplied pounds by five to turn them into dollars; a little more than their real value.

at £138,715,571, less than one-sixth part of her war-debt; and her entire resources, private as well as public, were reckoned the same year at £5,547,484,517, only a little more than six times as much as her debt in 1815. Its interest alone, if left to accumulate, would in the lapse of a few ages, consume her whole wealth. Her war-expenses even in peace would in less than seventy years exhaust all her property at home, and consume in one century all her resources over the globe! If we consider all the ways, direct and indirect, in which the war-system destroys property, it will be found even in peace to waste for Europe alone nearly two thousand millions every year, and we should be quite moderate in putting the sum total at fifteen hundred millions!

How much, then, must war have wasted in five thousand years over the whole earth! Look back to the time when it was the all-absorbing business of nations, every other pursuit its handmaid, and intervals of peace only resting-places to recruit for this work of blood; imagine one-eighth, in some cases one-fifth and even one-fourth part of the population to be soldiers, all trained to war as the leading object of their life; think of Bacchus and Sesostris with millions of warriors at their heels; of Ninus and Semiramis with two millions of soldiers, and more than ten thousand armed chariots; of Cyrus and Cambyses, of Alexander and Cæsar, with their ferocious successors; of Turks and Tartars, Saracens and Crusaders; of Tamerlane, and Jenghiz-khan, and Napoleon; conceive these countless millions of robbers, marauders and incendiaries, not merely consuming for their own support an amount altogether incalculable, but burning villages and cities, laying waste empires, and ravaging the whole earth age after age with fire and sword; and it would seem a low estimate to suppose, that the entire course of war has wasted fifty times as much as all the property now on the globe!!

But for this curse of curses, what a world might ours have been! Give it back all the property that war has cost, and prevented, and destroyed from the first; and the bare interest 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 the entire surface of our globe a complete net-work of canals and rail-ways; to beautify every one of her cities, beyond all ancient or mod

ern 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. Take an estimate or two. With the eighteen millions a year from our own treasury for, war, or the fifty millions more from the pockets of the people for our militia system, how much good might be done in a multitude of ways. Eighteen millions!-this alone is more than twice the original cost of the Great Western Canal from Albany to Buffalo, which has added hundreds of millions to the value of our western country; three or four times as much as our whole population pay yearly for the support of the gospel at home, and nearly a hundred times as much as the average amount of annual contributions from all the Christians in our land, the last thirty years, for evangelizing the world! What then might have been accomplished for the good of mankind by the hundreds and even thousands of millions wasted by ourselves upon this custom during and since our revolutionary war!

Glance at all Christendom. The bare interest at five per cent. on her entire war-debt would be $500,000,000 a year; and with this sum we might every year make a railway nearly round the globe, or pay the necessary expenses of all its governments without war, or support a minister of the gospel for every five hundred of its inhabitants! Take the fifteen hundred millions annually wasted in time of peace; and, in fifty years, it would suffice to make, at $30,000 a mile, no less than 2,500,000 miles of rail-road; enough to encircle the globe more than a hundred times!!

Would to God that the lessons taught by fifty centuries of blood, might be duly impressed at length upon a warring world! Take them, ye heralds of the cross, and proclaim them aloud to the multitudes that hang upon your lips. Let the press send them forth on the wings of steam all over the earth. Ponder them well, ye who hold the helm of state. Come hither, ye millions of oppressed and starving poor, come, and learn the chief cause of your woes. Ye are all the victims of war. His brand is on your brow; his manacles on your limbs; the blight of his withering curse upon all your pursuits and interests. It is the master-tyrant of our world; and every one that loves God or his country, his species or himself, should unite to sweep from the earth a despotism so bloody and baleful.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS,

No. XV.

APPEAL TO CITIES:

OR

THE SPECIAL CLAIMS OF PEACE UPON THEM.

THE cause of peace aims solely at the abolition of war, and has nothing to do with any thing else—with capital punishment, the suppression of mobs, the treatment of robbers and pirates, or any other matters of civil, internal government. We are concerned only with the intercourse of nations, and seek merely to abolish the custom of settling their disputes by the sword.

An object this of vast importance; and for its accomplishment we would fain unite all the friends of God and man in the use of appropriate means. These means are all included essentially in such an application of the gospel as shall Christianize public opinion on the subject, bring war under the ban of the civilized world, and thus lead its nations to discard forever their savage method of settling their disputes. We would train up a new and entire generation of peace-makers; and for this purpose we would enlist the pulpit and the press, the church and the school, the fire-side and the workshop, the parent and the teacher, old and young, male and female, the mass of every/community professing a religion which promises, as one of its results, the permanent reign of peace over the whole earth.

We neither expect nor desire any violent or sudden change. We labor, by the diffusion of light and love, for such a change of public sentiment as shall effectually demand the peaceful adjustment of all difficulties between nations. We propose neither to sacrifice nor endanger their interest, but simply to introduce better means for the protection of their rights, the redress of their wrongs, and the settlement of their disputes. We would gradually supersede war by such substitutes as negotiation, arbitration and mediation, or some permanent system, like a congress of nations, which shall combine all these principles, and perform for states essentially the same services that our codes and courts of law now do for individuals. We would have rulers, like their subjects, adjust their difficulties without bloodshed. They could, if they would; they will whenever

P. T. NO. XV.

public opinion shall demand it aright; that opinion, properly enlightened, would thus demand it; and hence we seek to form such an opinion by spreading light on this subject all over the civilized world.

Already is this work most auspiciously begun. A few philanthropists in both hemispheres united in this cause soon after the downfall of Napoleon; and with an average expenditure for all Christendom of only four or five thousand dollars a year for the first twenty-five years, have they made an impression on the civilized world, and materially modified its international policy. Public opinion on this subject is widely different from what it was fifty or even thirty years ago; and difficulties which would then have occasioned fierce, protracted wars, are now adjusted often with scarce a thought of appealing to arms. Peace is fast becoming the settled policy of Christendom; and, should this policy continue much longer, it may become almost impossible to involve its nations again in blood, and quite easy to introduce some permanent mode of adjusting their disputes without the sword. The general peace of Christendom since 1815, has resulted very much from the efforts and influences which together constitute the cause of peace; and we might mention instances in which they have, in the judgment of such men as the venerable John Quincy Adams, been the means of saving our own country from war.

Our encouragment is most ample; and, since the time has fully come for a more vigorous and hopeful prosecution of this enterprise, we would appeal to our friends for the aid which is just as necessary in this cause as in any other. We must enlighten the people; we must bring the subject before rulers; we must employ agents, and send forth lecturers; we must issue a variety of publications, and scatter tracts, periodicals and volumes through the land.

All this will require money as well as personal efforts; and for both we appeal to the friends of peace especially in our cities. Every argument applicable to others, will apply with equal force to yourselves. Does war suspend or derange business, cripple every department of industry, and dry up all the great sources of wealth? Does it waste property by millions, butcher men by thousands, and sweep in fire and blood over whole empires? Are its laurels steeped in the tears of countless widows and orphans? Is it a mass of abominations, a source of mischief and misery to nearly all concerned? Does it trample on the Sabbath,