and their grey hairs descend with sorrow to the grave. No honour is paid to learning, sciences, arts; the elegant pursuits of liberal and honourable minds. In a word, more misery is felt from war than the eloquence of any man, much more than mine, is able to describe: yet it might be borne patiently, if war made us miserable only, and did not corrupt our morals, and involve us in guilt; if peace made us only happier, and not better: but the man who engages in war by choice, when he could have avoided it; that man, whoever he is, is a wicked man: he sins against nature, against God, against man, and is guilty of the most aggravated and complicated impiety.

Too many, alas! are the evils by which miserable mortality is of necessity tormented, worn out, and at last overwhelmed. Two thousand years ago, no fewer than three hundred names of dangerous diseases, besides their various species and degrees, were discovered by the physicians: and every day, even now, new diseases arise. Old age itself is a disease, an incurable disease. We read of whole cities buried in ruins by earthquakes, or burnt to ashes by lightning, whole countries swallowed up in chasms occasioned by subterranean convulsions; not to mention how many men are lost by casualties, which, by the frequency of their occurrence, cease to surprise; how many are drowned in seas and rivers ; how many destroyed by poison, by falling, by other accidents; how many by intemperance in food, in drink, in sleep. The most trifling thing can deprive man of life. A grape-stone in the throat, a hair, a bone of a fish, has brought many to an untimely grave. Sudden joy has been fatal: no wonder that grief has been so. Add to all this the plague, and pestilent, contagious fevers of various kinds, which

frequently commit their ravages, without mercy or distinction, throughout a whole city or province. There is no quarter from which danger does not hang, as it were, by a hair over the life of man. Life itself, even if no accident shorten it, flies away with the swiftest velocity. Such and so great are the miseries of human life, that Homer did not hesitate to pronounce man, of all creatures, to whom the breath of life has been given, the most miserable. But these evils, as they cannot easily be shunned, and fall on our heads without any fault of our own, make us indeed wretched, but do not render us guilty.

Nevertheless, why should those who are obnoxious. to so many calamities go voluntarily in quest of an adscititious evil, as if the measure of misery required to be full to the very brim, and to run over; in quest of an evil, not a common evil, but an evil, of all human evils, the worst and the foulest; so destructive an evil, that alone it exceeds them all in mischief; so abundant in misery, that it comprehends every kind of wretchedness within itself; so pestilential in its nature, that it loads men with guilt in proportion as it galls them with woe; rendering them at the same time objects of the greatest pity, yet unworthy of being pitied at all; unless, indeed, it be those who, while they feel the misery with the greatest acuteness of suffering, have the least concern in causing it, and would have prevented it, if they had possessed power corresponding with their innocent inclination?

To these considerations add, that the advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers; while in war, if any thing turns out happily, (though, O my God, what can ever deserve the appellation of happy in war!) the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reap

ing it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another; one man's prize derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed; and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe. Indeed, at the conclusion, it commonly happens, that both sides, the victorious and the vanquished, have cause to deplore. I know not whether any war ever succeeded so fortunately in all its events, but that the conqueror, if he had a heart to feel, or an understanding to judge, as he ought to do, repented that he ever engaged in it at all.

Therefore, since peace is confessedly of all things the best and the happiest; and war, on the contrary, appears to be attended with the greatest possible distress of every kind, and the blackest villany of which human nature is capable, can we think those men of sound mind or honest hearts, who, when they might enjoy the blessings of peace with little trouble, merely by negociation, go out of their way, rush headlong into every difficulty and danger, to involve a whole people in the horrors of war?

How unpleasant, in the first place, to the unoffending people, is the first rumour of war? and in the next, how unpopular does it render the prince, when he is compelled to rob his own subjects by taxes upon taxes, and tribute upon tribute! How much trouble and anxiety in forming and preserving alliances! How much in engaging foreign troops, who are let out by their owners to fight for hire! How much expense, and at the same time solicitude, in fitting out fleets, in building or repairing forts, in manufacturing all kinds of camp equipage, in fabri

cating and transporting machines, armour, weapons, baggage, carriages, provisions! What infinite fatigue in fortifying towns, digging trenches, excavating mines, in keeping watch and ward, in exercising, reviewing, manœuvring, marching and countermarching! I say nothing of the constant state of fear and alarm in which the people live: I say nothing of the real danger to which they are perpetually exposed. Such is the uncertainty of war, that what is there not to be feared in it? Who can enumerate the inconveniencies and hardships which they who foolishly go to war, (Stultissimi milites, says Erasmus,) endure in a camp! deserving greater, because they voluntarily undergo all that they suffer! Food such as a hog would loathe; beds which even a bug would disdain; little sleep, and that little at the will of another; a tent exposed to every bitter blast that blows, and often not even a tent to shelter their cold limbs from the wind and the weather! They must continue all night, as well as day, in the open air; they must lie on the ground; they must stand in their arms; they must bear hunger, cold, heat, dust, rain; they must be in a state of abject slavery to their leaders; even beaten with canes! There is, indeed, no kind of slavery on earth more unworthy man than the slavery of these poor wretches in unnecessary wars! After all these hardships, comes the dreadful signal for engagement! To death they must go! They must either slay without mercy, or fall without pity!

Such and so great are the evils which are submitted to, in order to accomplish an end, itself a greater evil than all that have preceded in preparation for it. We thus afflict ourselves for the noble end of enabling ourselves to afflict others. If we were to calculate the matter fairly, and form a just

computation of the cost attending war, and that of procuring peace, we should find that peace might be purchased at a tenth part of the cares, labours, troubles, dangers, expenses, and blood, which it costs to carry on a war. You lead a vast multitude of men into danger of losing their lives, in order to demolish some great city; while the same labour and fatigue of these very men would build, without any danger, a more magnificent city than the city doomed to demolition. But the object is to do all possible injury to an enemy. A most inhuman object, let me tell you! And consider, whether you can hurt him essentially, without hurting, at the same time, and by the same means, your own people. It surely is to act like a madman to take to yourself so large a portion of certain evil, when it must ever be uncertain how the die of war may fall in the ultimate issue.

But grant that the heathens might be hurried into all this madness and folly by anger, by ambition, by avarice, by cruelty, or, which I am rather inclined to believe, by the furies sent from Hell for that very purpose; yet how could it ever enter into our hearts, that a Christian should imbrue his hands in the blood of a Christian! If a brother murder his brother, the crime is called fratricide: but a Christian is more closely allied to a Christian as such, then a brother by the ties of consanguinity; unless the bonds of nature are stronger than the bonds of Christ, which Christians, consistently with their faith, cannot allow. How absurd then is it, that they should be constantly at war with each other; who form but one family, the church of Christ; who are members of the same body; who boast of the same head, even Jesus Christ; who have one Father in Heaven, common to them all; who grow in grace by the same spirit; who