and damp earth; who sit at their well-spread board, and hire others to take the chance of starving; who nurse the slightest hurt in their own bodies, and hire others to expose themselves to mortal wounds and to linger in comfortless hospitals; certainly this mass reap little honor from war. The honor belongs to those immediately engaged in it.

Let me ask, then, what is the chief business of war? It is to destroy human life, to mangle the limbs, to gash and hew the body, to plunge the sword into the heart of a fellow-creature, to strew the earth with bleeding frames, and to trample them under foot with horses' hoofs. It is to batter down and burn cities, to turn fruitful fields into deserts, to level the cottage of the peasant and the magnificent abode of opulence, to scourge nations with famine, to multiply widows and orphans.

Are these honorable deeds? Were re you called to name ex-ploits' worthy of demons, would you not naturally select such as these? Grant that a necessity for them may exist; it is a dreadful necessity, such as a good man must recoil from with instinctive horror; and though it may exempt them from guilt, it cannot turn them into glory. We have thought that it was honorable to heal, to save, to mitigate pain, to snatch the sick and sinking from the jaws of death. We have placed among the revered benefactors of the human race the discoverers of arts which alleviate human sufferings; which prolong, comfort, adorn and cheer human life; and if these arts be honorable, where is the glory of multiplying and aggravating tortures and death?

DR. CHANNING.

LIII. SKEPTICISM OF THE AGE.

Ir seems to me you lay your finger here on the heart of the world's maladies, when you call it a skeptical world. An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French revolutions, chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,their chief necessity to be. This must alter. Till this alter, nothing can beneficially alter. My one hope of the world, my inexpugnable consolation, in looking at the miseries of the world, is, that this is altering. Here and there, one does now find a man who knows, as of old, that this world is a truth, and no plausibility and falsity; that he himself is alive, not dead or paralytic, and the world is alive, instinct with Godhood, beautiful and awful, even as in the beginning of days! One man once knowing this, many men, all men, must, by and by, come to know

THE SPIRIT OF PERSECUTION STILL EXTANT. 85

it. It lies there clear, for whosoever will take the spectacles off his eyes, and honestly look to know.

The

For such a man the unbelieving century, with its unblessed products, is already past; a new century is already come. old unblessed products and performances, as solid as they look, are phantasms, preparing speedily to vanish. To this and the other noisy, very great looking simula'crum, with the whole world huzzaing at its heels, he can say, composedly stepping aside, Thou art not true; thou art not extant, only semblant; go thy way! Yes, hollow formalism, gross Benthamism, and other unheroic atheistic insincerity, is visibly and even rapidly declining. An unbelieving eighteenth century is but an exception, such as now and then occurs. I prophesy that the world

will once more become sincere; a believing world; with many heroes in it, a heroic world! It will then be a victorious world, never till then.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

LIV. - THE SPIRIT OF PERSECUTION STILL EXTANT.

Ir is very difficult to make the mass of mankind believe that the state of things is ever to be otherwise than they have been accustomed to see it. I have very often heard old persons describe the impossibility of making any one believe that the American Colonies could ever be separated from this country. It was always considered as an idle dream of discontented politicians, good enough to fill up the periods of a speech, but which no practical man, devoid of the spirit of party, considered to be within the limits of possibility. There was a period when the slightest concession would have satisfied the Americans; but all the world was in heroics. One set of gentlemen met at the Lamb, and another at the Lion blood-and-treasure men, breathing war, vengeance, and contempt; and in eight years. afterwards, an awkward-looking gentleman in plain clothes walked up to the drawing-room of St. James's, in the midst of the gentlemen of the Lion and the Lamb, and was introduced as the ambassador from the United States of America.

Mild and genteel people do not like the idea of persecution, and are advocates for toleration; but, then, they think it no act of intolerance to deprive Catholics of political power. The history of all this is, that all men secretly like to punish others for not being of the same opinion with themselves, and that this sort of privation is the only species of persecution of which the improved feeling and advanced cultivation of the age will admit.

Fire and fagot, chains and stone walls, have been clamored away; nothing remains but to mortify a man's pride and to limit his resources, and to set a mark upon him by cutting him off from his fair share of political power. By this receipt insolence is gratified, and humanity is not shocked.

The gentlest Protestant can see, with dry eyes, Lord Stourton excluded from Parliament, though he would abominate the most distant idea of personal cruelty to Mr. Petre. This is only to say that he lives in the nineteenth, instead of the sixteenth century, and that he is as intolerant in religious matters as the state of manners existing in his age will permit. Is it not the same spirit which wounds the pride of a fellow-creature on account of his faith, or which casts his body into the flames? Are they any thing else but degrees and modifications of the same principle? The true spirit is to search after God and for another life with lowliness of heart; to fling down no man's altar, to punish no man's prayer; to heap no penalties and no pains on those solemn supplications which, in divers tongues and in varied forms, and in temples of a thousand shapes, but with one deep sense of human dependence, men pour forth to God.

REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

LV. - TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PEACE.

WHILE we act, sir, upon the maxim "In peace prepare for war," let us also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then, if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state-no, sir, not all combined- can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.

But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir, that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast extension into a span.

Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population, let the printing-office, the lecture-room, the

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village school-house, and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.

EDWARD EVERETT.

LVI. EFFECT OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS.

OVER how broad a portion of the world, sir, have we extended the advantages we ourselves enjoy! Our domain unites the noblest valley on the surface of the globe, competent to grow food for human beings many more than now dwell on the face of the earth, with an eastern wing fitted for the site of the principal manufacturing and commercial power of existing Christendom, and a western flank well situated to hold the same position on the Pacific, when Asia shall renew her youth, and Australia shall have risen to the level of Europe. Bewildering, almost, is the suddenness of our expansion to fill these limits, and astounding are the phenomena that accompany this development. This day there stands before the councils of the nation, deputed to participate in their deliberations, a young man* born within sight of old Concord bridge, and educated under the institutions which Concord fight secured, who, when he revisits the old homestead, claims to represent a territory larger than France and the united British kingdom,-capable of containing, if settled to the present density of Great Britain, more than a hundred millions of souls,a territory lately the joint inheritance of the Indian and the grisly bear, now outstripping, in its instant greatness, all recorded colonies, the Ophir of our age, richer than Solomon's, richer than the wildest vision that ever dazzled Arabian fancy.

Occupying such a continent, receiving it consecrated by the toils and sufferings and outpouring of ancestral blood, which on the day we now commemorate began, how delightful is the duty which devolves on us, to guard the beacon-fire of liberty, whose flames our fathers kindled! Suffer it not, my friends,- suffer it not, posterity that shall come after us, to be clouded by domestic dissension, or obscured by the dank, mephitic vapors of faction!

Until now, its pure irradiance dispels doubt and fear, and revivifies the fainting hopes of downcast patriotism. For ever may it shine brightly as now; for as yet its pristine luster fades not, but still flashes out the ancient, clear, and steady illumination, joy-giving as the blaze that, leaping from promontory to promon

*The representative from California.

tory, told the triumph of Agamemnon over fated Troy! It towers and glows, refulgent and beautiful, far seen by the tempest-tost on the sea of revolution, darting into the dungeons of gaunt despair beams whose benignant glory no lapse of time shall dim; the wanderers in the chill darkness of slavery it guides, and cheers, and warms; it fills the universe with its splendor.

ROBERT RANTOUL.

LVII. - VOYAGE OF THE MAYFLOWER.

METHINKS I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future State, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel.

The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth; weak and exhausted from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board; drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes.

Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers! Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the boundaries of New England! Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast! Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures, of other times, and find the parallel of this!