effectually against all wars of aggression, invasion, conquest, and slavery. We are happy to strengthen our position by the opinion of one of the ablest Judges on the Bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.* "All wars should be accomplished by a system of direct and internal taxation. Nothing short of this can show, in addition to sacrifice of life, what we pay for military glory. This was the policy in the better days of the Republic."

"Food for powder, food for powder."- SHAKSPEARE.

PHYSICIANS are accustomed to make an examination, after the disease has proved fatal, in order to ascertain more clearly its seat, causes, and diagnosis. It is not a grateful task to enter into the bloody chambers, where life was mysteriously hidden; but they do it for the sake of the living, and to prevent the repetition of like effects. The moralist and Christian, too, are sometimes obliged to make, so to speak, post mortem examinations, for however painful it may be, to live over again scenes of violence and wrong, and to follow the track of armies, yet they feel it to be a duty if they can by this means obtain powerful evidences in behalf of the cause they advocate. They wish thus to call the surgeon, as well as the financier, to testify to the evils of war, and to invoke

* Judge McLean.

the hospital no less than the exchange, to pronounce its condemning sentence.

But here, as in the matter of war-expenditures, the very immensity of the suffering wounds, maiming, sickness, death, caused by war,staggers our conception, and paralyzes our imagination. When we read that a thousand men died in battle, that two thousand were sick in the hospital, we no more realize that infinite sum of misery than we do the length of eternity. But let only one image of personal agony rise vividly before us, the active, hopeful, widely-endeared young man, reeling headlong from his horse, crushed and bleeding by the terrible cannon ball,—or the father on whom a whole family depends, languishing month after month in a foreign clime, anxious, weak, pained, dying by inches, with no hand of wife or child to bathe the fevered temples, or minister the healing cup; and we have a deeper impression of the unutterable miseries of war than solid pages of statistics could give us. And if we could then multiply one by many, and consider what a single hostile meeting of armies is, and does, could be in it, and yet not of it, could view it as a selfpossessed spectator, could see all the cruel machines of death in "awful activity," the earth trembling with the thunder of artillery, the air rent with shrieks and shouts, the light of the sun shut out by sulphurous clouds, the waters running crimson with the heart's blood of thousands, every shot carrying away a limb or a life, every charge sweeping to the dust hundreds of poor wounded, dying creatures, we should pronounce a battle the very incarnation of hell on earth.

But men do not know what war is, how much of all that is most fearful in pain, and terror, and suffering, and death, is as surely drawn in its train, as any cause leads to any effect. Men at home who make war, do not know what they are doing, what mountains of misery and sin they are heaping upon their fellow men; for if they did know and had not hearts of flints, they would say, sooner than do this thing, this infinite evil, "perish our right arm from its socket, palsied be our

tongue in our mouth!" Men in camp and field become mailed and triple-mailed in their sensibilities by their dreadful familiarity with exhibitions of suffering; and whereas they would once have fainted at witnessing the slightest surgical operation, they can at last look unmoved on the carnage of Waterloo. So that the history of war never has been written, and from the necessity of the case, never can be. We may get a glimpse here and there, where its thunder-clouds are parted, and we look upon the ground strewed with the dead and dying; or where we walk through its long range of hospital wards, and hundreds of ghastly faces start up at the sound of our steps; but its physical, like its other evils, are too vast to be comprehended by a finite mind.

We are accustomed to speak of the late war between Mexico and the United States, as if it were the conflict of two soulless generalizations, two historical or geographical bodies, that pitched their camp and arrayed their battle, one against the other. The terms are corporate, political, and insensible. Happy indeed were it, if it were the meeting of names on on paper, and not of living men in the bloody field. Happy were it, even if the old custom of more chivalrous days were revived, and they, the historical personages who make the war, should themselves do the fighting, king meeting king, or president, president, either in their own persons, or in the representatives, and substitutes of their respective choice and country. Rivers of blood would thus be spared, and the question subjected to an equally fair mode of arbitrament and decision. But the nature of war, as it is now carried on, is far different. It is the personal conflict of thousands of Mexican men against thousands of United States' men. It is the raising of hand against hand, and the baring of hundreds of human bosoms to the awful hail of balls, and sabre strokes, and lance and bayonet thrusts. It is upon bodies keenly sensitive to the least wound, in every vein, and nerve, and fibre of which the Almighty has set the seal of his creative wisdom and goodness, and which he has made capable

of vast enjoyment, and suffering; it is upon head and heart, upon life and limb, that the bruises and lacerations come, smiting, crushing, snapping the bones as if they were worth no more than pipe-stems, rending open the flesh as if it were the meat of the shambles, and battering to pieces the image of God as if it were the common clay of the potter. It is not Mexico that suffers by the war; it is some thousands of her people, many of them innocent men, women, and children, who happened to come within the reach of the destroying ball and bomb, in the battle and siege. It is not the United States, that has been visited by pain, grief, loss of life, of health, friends, morals, through the instrumentality of this conflict; but it is certain men, families, living hearts, suffering bodies, agonized souls. In looking then at the tremendous devastations of war, let us remember that they all fall on individual human beings, and not on soulless corporations, insensible nations, or geographical names.

This destruction of human life in any aspect in which we can view it, is a complex evil. It has branches of mischief shooting in all directions. Existence is the free gift of God, and not lightly or unnecessarily to be trifled with or squandered. Every man born in a civilized community, reared to manhood, and armed and equiped with the requisite training, experience, and principle to act well his part in society, is to be considered as so much capital, invested for the best good of the land he lives in, and paying the rich percentage of usefulness and reciprocity to a large circle of fellow creatures. When prematurely taken away, before he has lived out half his days, by accident or sickness, we feel that it is an inscrutable Providence. But when by suicide he cuts short his probation, or when by the exposures and dangers of war, another species of suicide in one sense, he dies before his time, there is a great and positive loss to every interest of the community. Here is a world of work of every kind to do, the season is pressing, time does not halt, the harvest is

white unto the sickle, but the laborers that should enter into this rich and varied field, and reap fruit unto eternal life, are taken from their families, and far away are made "food for powder," or mowed down by disease, as if they were so many worthless animals. Little calculation is made to save their lives, except as constituting one of the prime materials for war. In making good a battle or forcing a siege, the aim is not to save the men but to gain the victory. Napoleon never hesitated to sacrifice any number of lives, provided he could thereby carry his point. Every general, in order to be successful, must adopt more or less the same principle. But every man that is offered upon the bloody plain to the god of battles, is one heart, one head, one life less, to do the great work for which men were placed temporarily on the earth,

to glorify their Maker, and benefit one another. So much has been subtracted out of the most valuable capital of a country, which no money can replace. A nation's life has been abridged; a nation's heart has bled some great drops of blood. Human life is the basis and condition to all other good, and in proportion as any considerable amount of it is violently abstracted from the community, do all the great interests of humanity receive a sensible shock.

In immediate connection with the above considerations upon the evils resulting from the loss of life in war, it should be added that it has especially a barbarizing influence upon the humane and moral sentiments of a people. This is true even of the wholesale mortality produced by the plague, cholera, famine, earthquake, or volcano. The heart of a community is apparently stunned by the frequent presence of death. Defoe, in his history of the plague in London, records with graphic simplicity the dreadful brutality and wickedness of the survivors, even while they were admonished every instant that death was at the door, if not rioting in the house. Much more does the waste of human life by agencies of man's own choosing and operating, harden the heart, and paralyze the