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was fit for the infernal office. The most pestilent of them all was selected for it,

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As the poets describe her, she is armed with snakes without number, and blows her blast in the trumpet of hell. Pan fills all the space around her with mad uproar. Bellona, in frantic mood, shakes her scourge. And the unnatural, impious fury, breaking every bond asunder, flies abroad all horrible to behold, with a visage besmeared with gore!

Even the grammarians, with all their trifling ingenuity, observing the deformity of war, say, that BELLUM, the Latin word for war, which signifies also the beautiful, or comely, was so called by the rhetorical figure Contradiction, (kar' avrippaoiv,) because it has nothing in it either good or beautiful; and that bellum is called bellum, by the same figure as the furies are called Eumenides. Other etymologists, with more judgment, derive bellum from bellua, a beast, because it ought to be more characteristic of beasts than of men, to meet for no other purpose than mutual destruction.

But to me it appears to deserve a worse epithet than brutal; it is more than brutal, when men engage in the conflict of arms; ministers of death to men! Most of the brutes live in concord with their own kind, move together in flocks, and defend each other by mutual assistance. Indeed all kinds of brutes are not inclined to fight even their enemies. There are harmless ones like the hare. It is only the fiercest, such as lions, wolves, and tigers, that fight at all. A dog will not devour his own species; lions, with all their fierceness, are quiet among themselves; dragons are said to live in peace with dra

gons; and even venomous creatures live with one another in perfect harmony.-But to man, no wild beast is more destructive than his fellow man.

Again; when the brutes fight, they fight with the weapons which nature gave them; we arm ourselves for mutual slaughter, with weapons which nature never thought of, but which were invented by the contrivance of some accursed fiend, the enemy of human nature, that man might become the destroyer of man. Neither do the beasts break out in hostile rage for trifling causes; but either when hunger drives them to madness, or when they find themselves attacked, or when they are alarmed for the safety of their young. We, good Heaven! on frivolous pretences, what tragedies do we act on the theatre of war! Under colour of some obsolete and disputable claim to territory; in a childish passion for a mistress; for causes even more ridiculous than these, we kindle the flames of war. Among the beasts, the combat is for the most part only one against one, and for a very short space. And though the contest should be bloody, yet when one of them has received a wound, it is all over. Whoever heard (what is common among men in one campaign) that a hundred thousand beasts had met in battle for mutual butchery? Besides, as beasts have a natural hatred to some of a different kind, so are they united to others of a different kind, in a sincere and inviolable alliance. But man with man, and any man with any man, can find an everlasting cause for contest, and become, what they call, natural enemies; nor is any agreement or truce found sufficiently obligatory to bind man from attempting, on the appearance of the slightest pretexts, to commence hostilities after the most solemn convention. So true it is, that whatever has deviated from its

own nature into evil, is apt to degenerate to a more depraved state, than if its nature had been originally formed with inbred malignity.

Do you wish to form a lively idea, however imperfect, of the ugliness and the brutality of war, (for we are speaking of its brutality,) and how unworthy it is of a rational creature? Have you ever seen a battle between a lion and a bear? What distortion, what roaring, what howling, what fierceness, what bloodshed! The spectator of a fray, in which mere brutes like these are fighting, though he stands in a place of safety, cannot help shuddering at a sight so bloody. But how much more shocking a spectacle to see man conflicting with man, armed from head to foot with a variety of artificial weapons! Who could believe that creatures so engaged were men, if the frequency of the sight had not blunted its effect on our feelings, and prevented surprise? Their eyes flashing, their cheeks pale, their very gait and mien expressive of fury; gnashing their teeth, shouting like madmen, the whole man transformed to steel; their arms clanging horribly, while the cannon's mouth thunders and lightens around them. It would really be less savage, if man destroyed and devoured man for the sake of necessary food, or drank blood through lack of beverage. Some, indeed, (men in form) have come to such a pitch as to do this from rancour and wanton cruelty, for which expediency or even necessity could furnish only a poor excuse. More cruel still, they fight on some occasions with weapons dipt in poison, and engines invented in Tartarus, for wholesale havoc at a single stroke.

You now see not a single trace of man, that social creature, whose portrait we lately delineated. Do you think nature would recognise the work of her

own hand-the image of God? And if any one were to assure her that it was so, would she not break out into execrations at the flagitious actions of her favourite creature? Would she not say, when she saw man thus armed against man, "What new sight do I behold? Hell itself must have produced this portentous spectacle. There are, who call me a step-mother, because in the multiplicity of my works I have produced some that are venomous, (though even they are convertible to the use of man,) and because I created some, among the variety of animals, wild and fierce; though there is not one so wild and so fierce, but he may be tamed by good management and good usage. Lions have grown gentle, serpents have grown innoxious under the care of man. Who is this then, worse than a step-mother, who has brought forth a non-descript brute, the plague of the whole creation? I, indeed, made one animal, like this, in external appearance; but with kind propensities, all placid, friendly, beneficent. How comes it to pass, that he has degenerated to a beast, such as I now behold, still in the same human shape? I' recognise no vestige of man, as I created him. What demon has marred the work of my hands? hands? What Sorceress, by her enchantments, has discharged from the human figure, the human mind, and supplied its place by the heart of a brute? What Circe has transformed the man that I made into a beast? I would bid this wretched creature behold himself in a mirror, if his eyes were capable of seeing himself when his mind is no more. Nevertheless, thou depraved animal, look at thyself, if thou canst; reflect on thyself, thou frantic warrior, if by any means thou mayst recover thy lost reason, and be restored to thy pristine nature. Take the looking-glass, and inspect it. How came that threatening crest of plumes upon thy head?

Did I give thee feathers? Whence that shining helmet? Whence those sharp points, which appear like horns of steel? Whence are thy hands and arms furnished with sharp prickles? Whence those scales, like the scales of fish, upon thy body? Whence those brazen teeth? Whence those plates of brass all over thee? Whence those deadly weapons of offence? Whence that voice, uttering sounds of rage more horrible than the inarticulate noise of the wild beasts? Whence the whole form of thy countenance and person distorted by furious passions, more than brutal? Whence that thunder and lightning which I perceive around thee, at once more frightful than the thunder of heaven, and more destructive to man? I formed thee an animal a little lower than the angels, a partaker of divinity; how camest thou to think of transforming thyself into a beast so savage, that no beast hereafter can be deemed a beast, if it be compared with man, originally the image of God, the lord of the creation?"

Such, and much more, would, I think, be the outcry of indignant Nature, the architect of all things, viewing man transformed to a warrior.

Now, since man was so made by nature, as I have above shown him to have been, and since war is that which we too often feel it to be, it seems matter of infinite atonishment, what demon of mischief, what distemperature, or what fortuitous circumstances, could put it into the heart of man to plunge the deadly steel into the bosom of his fellow-creature. He must have arrived at a degree of madness so şingular by insensible gradations, since

Nemo repentè fuit turpissimus.

Τυν.

It has ever been found that the greatest evils have insinuated themselves among men under the shadow

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