+

mander can not be present every where, and see every wood, watercourse, or travine, in which his orders are carried into execution; he learns, from reports, how the work goes on. It is well; for a battle is one of those jobs which men do, without daring to look upon. Over miles of country, at every field-fence, in every gorge of a valley, or entry into a wood, there is murder committing, wholesale, continuous, +reciprocal murder. The human form, God's image, is +mutilated, deformed, lacerated, in every possible way, and with every variety of torture. The wounded are jolted off in carts to the rear, their bared nerves crushed into maddening pain at every stone or rut; or the flight and pursuit trample over them, leaving them to writhe and groan, without assistance; and fever and thirst, the most enduring of painful sensations, possess them entirely.

2. Thirst, too, has seized upon the yet able-bodied soldier, who with blood-shot eye and tongue lolling out, *plies his trade; blaspheming; killing, with savage delight; callous, when the brains of his best-loved comrade are spattered over him! The battle-field is, if possible, a more painful object of contemplation than the combatants. They are in their ✦vocation, earning their bread: what will not men do for a shilling a day? But their work is carried on amid the fields, gardens, and homesteads of men unused to war. They left their homes, with all that habit and happy associations have made precious, to bear its brunt. The poor, the aged, the sick are left in a hurry, to be killed by stray shots or beaten down as the charge or counter-charge go over them. The ripening grain is trampled down: the garden is trodden into a black mud; the fruit-trees, bending beneath their luscious load, are shattered by the cannon-shot; churches and private dwellings are used as fortresses, and ruined in the +conflict; barns and granaries take fire, and the conflagration spreads on all sides.

3. At night, the steed is stabled beside the altar, and the weary thomicides of the day complete the wrecking of houses, to make their lairs for slumber. The fires of the +bivouac complete what the fires kindled by the battle have not consumed. The surviving soldiers march on, to act the same scene over again, elsewhere; and the remnant of the

scattered inhabitants return, to find the mangled bodies of those they had loved, amid the blackened ruins of their homes; to mourn, with more than agonizing grief, over the missing, of whose fate they are uncertain; to feel themselves bankrupts of the world's stores, and look from their children to the desolate fields and garners, and think of famine and pestilence, engendered by the rotting bodies of the halfburied myriads of slain.

4. The soldier marches on and on, inflicting and suffering, as before. War is a continuance of battles, an epidemic, striding from place to place, more horrible than the typhus, pestilence, or cholera, which, not unfrequently follow in its train. The siege is an aggravation of the battle. The peaceful inhabitants of the beleagued town are cooped up, and can not fly the place of conflict. The mutual injuries, inflicted by *assailants and assailed, are taggravated; their wrath is more frenzied; then come the storm and the capture, and the riot and excesses of the victor soldiery, striving to quench the drunkenness of blood in the drunkenness of wine.

5. The eccentric movements of war, the marching and counter-marching, often repeat the blow on districts, slowly recovering from the first. Between destruction and the wasteful consumption of the soldiery, poverty pervades the land. Hopeless of the future, hardened by the scenes of which he is a daily witness, perhaps, goaded by revenge, the peasant becomes a plunderer and assassin. The families of the upper classes are dispersed; the discipline of the family circle is removed; a habit of living in the day, for the day, of drowning the morrow in transient and illicit pleasure, is tengendered. The waste and desolation which a battle spreads over the battle-field, is as nothing, when compared with the moral desolation which war diffuses through all ranks of society, in the country which is the scene of war.

XCIII. THE PHILOSOPHER'S SCALES.

FROM JANE TAYLOR.

1. A MONK, when his rites *sacerdotal were o'er,
In the depth of his cell with his stone-cover'd floor,
Resigning to thought his chimerical brain,
Once form'd the contrivance we now shall explain;
But whether by magic's or *alchemy's powers,
We know not; indeed, 't is no business of ours.

2. Perhaps, it was only by patience and care,

At last, that he brought his inventions to bear;
In youth 't was *projected, but years stole away,
And ere 't was complete, he was wrinkled and gray;
But success is secure, unless energy fails;

And, at length, he produc'd the philosopher's scales.

3 "What were they?" you ask. You shall presently see;
These scales were not made to weigh sugar and tea;
O no; for such properties wondrous had they,
That qualities, feelings, and thoughts, they could weigh;
Together with articles small or immense,

From mountains or planets, to *atoms of sense.

4. Naught was there so bulky, but there it would lay,

And naught so

And naught so

ethereal, but there it would stay,
reluctant, but in it must go :

All which some examples more clearly will show.

5. The first thing he weigh'd was the head of Voltaire,

Which retain'd all the wit that had ever been there;
As a weight he threw in a torn scrap of a leaf,
Containing the prayer of the *penitent thief;
When the skull rose aloft with so sudden a spell,
That it bounc'd like a ball on the roof of the cell.

6. One time, he put in Alexander the Great,

With a garment that Dorcas had made for a weight,
And, though clad in armor from †sandals to crown,
The hero rose up, and the garment went down.

7. A long row of alms-houses, amply tendow'd
By a well-esteemed +Pharisee, busy and proud,
Next loaded one scale; while the other was prest
By those mites the poor widow drop'd into the chest ;
Up flew the endowment, not weighing an ounce,
And down, down the farthing-worth came with a bounce.

8. By further texperiments, (no matter how,)

He found that ten chariots weigh'd less than one plow;
A sword with gilt trapping rose up in the scale,
Though balanc'd by only a ten-penny nail;
A shield and a helmet, a buckler and spear,
Weigh'd less than a widow's +uncrystaliz'd tear.

9. A lord and a lady went up at full sail,

When a bee chanc'd to light on the opposite scale;
Ten doctors, ten lawyers, two courtiers, one earl,
Ten counselors' wigs, full of powder and curl,
All heap'd in one balance and swinging from thence,
Weigh'd less than a few grains of candor and sense;

10. A first water tdiamond, with +brilliants begirt,
Than one good potato, just wash'd from the dirt;
Yet not mountains of silver and gold could suffice,
One pearl to outweigh, 't was the pearl of great price.

11. Last of all, the whole world was bowl'd in at the grate,
With the soul of a beggar to serve for a weight,

When the former sprang up with so strong a trebuff,
That it made a vast rent and escap'd at the roof;
When, balanc'd in air, it ascended on high,
And sail'd up aloft, a balloon in the sky;

While the scale with the soul in 't so mightily fell,
That it jerk'd the philosopher out of his cell.

1. In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man "dominion over all the earth; and over the fishes of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moved upon the earth." This is the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things, whatever airy, metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers on this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator. And while the earth continued bare of inhabitants, it is reasonable to

suppose that all was in common among them, and that every one took from the public stock, to his own use, such things as his immediate necessities required.

2. These general notions of property were then sufficient to answer all purposes of human life; and might, perhaps, still have answered them, had it been possible for mankind to have remained in a state of primeval simplicity, in which "all things were common to him." Not that this communion of goods seems ever to have been applicable, even in the earliest stages, to aught but the substance of the thing; nor could it be extended to the use of it. For, by the law of nature and reason, he who first began to use it, acquired therein, a kind of transient property, that lasted so long as he was using it, and no longer. Or, to speak with greater *precision, the right of possession continued for the same time, only, that the act of possession lasted.

3. Thus, the ground was in common, and no part of it was the property of any man in particular; yet, whoever was in the occupation of any determined spot of it, for rest, for shade, or the like, acquired for the time, a sort of ownership, from which, it would have been unjust and contrary to the law of nature, to have driven him by force; but, the instant he quitted the use or occupation of it, another might seize it without injustice. Thus, also, a vine or a tree might be said to be in common, as all men were equally entitled to its produce; and yet, any private individual might gain the sole property of the fruit which he had gathered for his own repast: a doctrine well illustrated by Cicero, who compares the world to a great theater which is common to the public, and yet the place which any man has taken, is, for the time, his own.

4. But when mankind increased in number, +craft, and ambition, it became necessary to entertain conceptions of a more permanent dominion; and to appropriate to individuals, not the immediate use only, but the very substance of the thing to be used. Otherwise, innumerable tumults must have arisen, and the good order of the world been continually broken and disturbed, while a variety of persons were striving who should get the first occupation of the same thing, or disputing which of them had actually gained it. As human life