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THOUGH peace may have her victories not less renowned than war, yet it fares ill with that people among whom the soldier and his services are not duly esteemed and suitably acknowledged. The darkest days were approaching for France when her wits ridiculed her soldiery, and Voltaire said his countrymen built ships which the English immediately took off their hands and commended as being well built. It is the pride of our vast wealth our inexhaustible resources—our many elements of power and eminence - that we can afford daly to honour and reward our warriors without forgetting the claims or sacrificing the interests of any class of men- without diminishing the rewards and honours of peaceful pursuits at little cost to our wealth, at none whatever to our civil liberty. If the dreams about universal peace are ever in any future century to be realized, it will not be through the means by which the Quaker school seek to accomplish them. As the world exists, and is likely to exist for as many thousands of years onwards, as we know its history backwards, peace among the nations shall only be secured by the existence of one predominant authority too powerful to render resistance within the

bounds of possibility. But who shall count the bloody fields to be fought and the remorseless tyrannies to be crushed before this beneficent end is achieved, and one magnanimous preponderating power shall be strong enough to bind over the rest of mankind to keep the peace!

one

So far as it is given to us to read. the destinies of Providence in the past histories and in the present action of the world, there is nation-and that our own-moving on step by step to this great destiny. In its progress towards an overwhelming preponderance, our power has never yet been checked; nor can we anywhere discover in its form and substance the elements of decay. We shall find that the great Empires which have heretofore risen and fallen, have owed their ruin to one or both of two destructive elements caused by their own unfaithfulness to their true duty. Either they have fallen before hostile combinations of the nations who have suffered from their oppression and rapacity, or, indolently reposing on the wealth and greatness which their forefathers have achieved, they have tempted poorer and hardier races to seize on the rich possessions they have lost the courage to defend. In the fall of Rome the