is not only a moral, but an historical archaicism, and that the profession of arms can no longer be justified. Provisions for national defence have therefore in our country been made with a little shame and no little grudging; the army has been kept at a minimum, or below it; the navy received stinted support; militia soldiering been half frolic to those engaged in it, and more than half nuisance to many who did not; and the military life has found hardly more than mere toleration from the better part of American society. That our little army has been officered chiefly from the South is not the result of favoritism alone, but is also due in part to the displeasure, and almost contempt, with which the military profession has been regarded by men of culture and humanity at the North.

With the desire of peace it would seem that every man of right mind ought to sympathize, and that no one should say a word to delay the advent of that millennium, which, of course, is always near at hand! Yet there are discriminations to be made. There is a living, and there is a dead peace; the one obtaining place where justice prevails, the other where it is not even held precious; that where its supremacy is undisputed, this where it is undesired; the former indicates the highest health of nations, the latter their leprosy and lowest debasement. These stand to each other as yea and nay, as life and death, as heaven and hell; not to distinguish between them is to elect the worse; while to choose the true peace is so to deny and abhor the false, that war, with all its fearfulness, shall be incomparably less fearful. If, therefore, the Peace Society do not steadily perceive and proclaim that war is worthy of all good men's choice in comparison with this peace of perfidy and corruption, it becomes the patron of all that is inimical to the weal of men; and if it advocate in the terms of faith and conscience this treachery to all that is precious in civilization, then is it the very flower of a nation's rottenness. To make composition with chaos for the sake of ease, safety, gain; to call this traitorous pact by the sacred title of peace; and then to pray over the lie, is but adding to whatsoever is basest and wickedest in action whatsoever is falsest and most

blasphemous in words. When, therefore, we say that peace is precious, let us mean that broad, established, intelligent communion in justice, broad common understandings for the best ends, are precious; and then our meaning will be one that the laws of the world can recognize as good. But if, on the contrary, our meaning be that justice is less precious than the outward circumstances of peace, and may with advantage be paid away in purchase of these, then are we not only renegade from right, which we intend to 'betray, but are traitors to Peace herself. It is no less an every-day truth than if the Bible did not intimate it, that peace follows after purity, and only as it is worthy can be enduring. There is a dead peace; but upon the heels of death treads decay, - decay and its soldier, the worm. No allegiance, therefore, to peace can there be, without due recognition of the fact that war, whenever it takes place in needful vindication of justice, is honorable, noble, sacred, so far as the champions of justice are concerned. Therefore, a Peace Society that respects outward peace only or chiefly is the very Judas of the time, not only selling God's justice for a price, but in the end hanging its cause and itself on a tree.

For wars in and of themselves we have no word either of praise or extenuation. Let them be hateful, not to mothers alone, as Horace has it,

bellaque matribus

66

Detestata,....

but to all women and all men forever. But who extols the ocean storm? Praiseworthy, nevertheless, is the mariner that braves it. And praiseworthy in the same way is he who, when the red billows of battle lie between his time and that port of pure manners and just rule toward which all times must sail, launches thereon his bark, to sink or swim as the destinies permit. Wars are great evils; but barbarous tyranny, and the submissions that flatter and perpetuate it, are great crimes. And between evils and crimes there is but one choice.

But consider, further, the function of war as simply potential and preventive. "The Empire is Peace," said Louis Napoleon; and a satirist offers the substitute, "War is Peace." But in one important sense war is peace, possible war is

the gage of actual peace. It is the alternative Right or Fight which secures right, and saves from the necessity of fighting. On this basis reposes the state, with every civil means of adjustment and redress. Legislature, jury, bench, the binding codes and rites that house nations and encircle the sanctities of homes, whatsoever secures men and women from perpetual liability to naked contact with savage passions and brutish apprehensions, these, and all the priceless immunities of civilization, all most slow-built and costly architectures of time, rest, as their bases of security, upon no other foundation. Lessing's Nathan may be right in saying that "No man must must"; but every society must put an Imperative, an It shall be, beneath its civilities, the hidden rocky foundation from which its majestic and delicate superstructures go safely aloft. And the loftier and more human the social edifice, the more adamantine-resolute must these foundations be. A public law differs from a public request only in virtue of that extreme resolution, those terrors of the imperative which uphold it; and a nation is a nation only as it is religiously banded and bound to support a social order against all assault. Hence the sacredness of law; hence patriotism, religious love of native land, and the dulce est pro patria mori.

Love and terror, these are the two powers which uphold civilization. It avails not to say, "If love enough abounded, fear could be dispensed with." It were as wise to say, "If we dwelt in the moon," and thereupon assume that we do dwell in the moon. Terror in the service of love holds the world together; and no sooner are its sharp ministries withdrawn than human society is dissolved, and chaos come. Terror serving love and guided by reason, take this away, and then would result a state of affairs such as the observer may see among domestic dogs, among whom, at any distance from home, there is, at each meeting, cautious, questioning approach, the query, "Is it amity, or hostility?" looking from each pair of anxious eyes, and this question never so answered on the fairer side that it may not in a moment pass to the fouler decision. Men rise from this state, and society begins there where two men say, implicitly or otherwise," We two will guarantee each other's defence, and between us reason

and right shall be for a law." And as this sacred, inevitable pact widens, it comes to run thus: "We twoscore, or twoscore thousand, will uphold the law of reason and justice over such a territory; it SHALL be binding on all within that limit; we pledge to good understandings and rational modes of adjustment our total and united force." Some obscure understanding of this sort, prevailing among small numbers, constitutes such beginnings of society as, for example, Atkinson found among the Tartars of the desert of Gobi. But where this pact prevails over a very limited space only, it furnishes a basis of security too narrow, and too little secure, to bear a grand superstructure of mutual trust, with the virtues, amenities, felicities, that exist only where trust is deep and firm. Beyond a very narrow circle, therefore, every man will be, as Atkinson observed, an object of utter distrust, of suspicions without measure; and there is nothing so barbarous, infamous, outrageous, that the possibility of it will not occur at every stranger's approach. The experience, accordingly, of a New York or Paris policeman, who must be perpetually canvassing the worst probabilities, and considering questions that scorch where they touch, must become the experience of every man and every woman; for virgin and matron, for apprehending childhood and resting old age, no forgetting of the worst things, no, not for a day! Ah, what is so precious as this permitted forgetfulness of obscenity and outrage, this golden obliviousness accorded to maidens, wives, young children, and to age, at peace among its beloved? Due remembrance there shall be; we will all bear on our hearts the sorrow and the guilt of humanity: but perpetual remembrance in fear, from this spare the sweet heads and white bosoms and dear retreats! But observe that, if love and reason will enlist terror in their service, they shall be served of it; but if they refuse, terror will become the soldier of confusion, and will scare away the sanctities and refinements it might have championed. Which is the better?

Truly, it seems rude and harsh, this footing of society; and there are many who long for a civilization that utters no menace, and rests on no basis but that of open friendliness and invitation to all. Nature, however, permits no literal fulfilment of

such wishes, gentle and amiable though they be. We may build high; but may not build solid castles in the air. We may build high and nobly; but the grandest minster, temple, cathedral, must, like the rudest hovel, rest at last on the earth. There is in life the same footing for saints and for sinners; alike they must eat, drink, sleep, walk the same earth, support their weight by the same brute exertion of muscle, pay the like impartial toll to the laws of the world. Basis for bad is basis for good; and the difference between worst and best among men is not in the elements used, but in the use made of them. Man stands and walks erect, with his head uplifted amid the clean atmospheres, that is to say, amid the skies, since the sky is but air; but the feet rest on the less clean ground. If you tell the traveller on the highway, that it is a poor, dusty, undesirable place down there where his feet are dwelling, earth, mere dust and earth, he must admit that it is indeed open to such accusation; and no one would wish the head to be reduced to the same low level and soiled companionship. But will you advise him to jump off his own feet? Undesirable that place may be; yet either the feet will abide there, or the head must; and he who is too proud to touch the soil with the sole of his foot will speedily be humble enough to embrace it with his hands. So human society may rear its head high, bathing heart and brain in an atmosphere of love, of forbearance and co-operation, of reverence for known rights and devotion to mutual duties; but beneath all this, the silent, unobtrusive, unconspicuous feet must press the earth of that hard alternative, Right, or the last Resistance! Right Reason, or the Right Arm! And no sooner shall any society refuse conformity with this order of Nature than -despite any sweetness of sentiment that may have begotten such denial- all its towering and sunward glories, all the domed and spiring architectures of so many toiling and believing ages, will totter, will topple, will thunder to the ground, and the dust shall go over them. O you who would attain the best, recognize conditions, yet abase not your heart! Stand on the earth, but be not earth!

We counsel, therefore, a frank acknowledgment of the dignity of the military calling, when worthily embraced; of the