are; and if we go back to first principles, they had better fight with their fists, like English boxers. It is barbarous to use a club or a bow; but what do we say to rifled cannon, bayonets with a triangular blade, Toledo swords, the Gourka creese, with which part of the British army is armned; to fusees, shells, bombs, torpedoes, grenades, serpents, and the whole devilish enginery of "glorious war?" If we employ one, where shall we draw the line, when stop? If we stop, will others do so? Is it very pleasant to reflect that, during the time our shipbuilders were forbidden to work for the American combatants, they were at work building iron ships for the Russian non-combatants-ships which are only likely to be employed against the English and French navies-and that all our forces, all our ships, all our men-of-war, are at the mercy of a foe who will not scruple to use Professor Jacobi's liquid fire, and who, if he did so, would bring our naval force very shortly to the end of the fabled Phoenix which expired in flames?

These are serious considerations. They will show us at least that, what with smoking us out, choking us to death, and setting fire to us, our foreign warrior-chemists will not have much mercy on us. They, as well as we, desire to make war decisive and short. All that our chemists can do is to try to discover the sharpest and most combustible agents, and, at the same time, "the art of effectually neutralizing," to quote Dr. Richardson, "an agent of destruction which we may scorn to employ, as beneath our civilization." At any rate, we may well agree with General Beauregard's

indignant protest against such being used against towns wherein are many women and children. If we are to fight at all, let us have reasonable rules of the ring, like prize-fighters do. Moreover, the barbarities of war have a tendency to cure themselves. Soldiers who are hardly pressed and brutally fought with, fight with more bitterness. There is also some comfort in the reflection that the "brutalities of warfare" do not pay in the long-run. Degrade the soldier to the mere chemical sneak, the poisoner in uniform, the town-burner, and the death-fumigator, and "glorious war" will soon be over. It, after all, proves nothing. The French knights, who said that "gunpowder was the grave of valour,” will, after long years, have their prediction realized; and we may, even in our generation, witness some attempt at the realization of that fond prophecy of that glorious time—

"When the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled,

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World;
When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm

in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”

Р

THE BARBARITIES OF PEACE.

N the magnificent sonnet which Milton addressed to the Lord Protector Cromwell occurs a noble and never-to-be-forgotten line—

"Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war;" words which are often cast in the teeth of warriors, and are now fairly enough thrown to the combatants who are fighting to the great distress of themselves and of the whole world : in short, a man thoroughly enamoured of peace would never be tired of enlarging on her blessings, and on the curses and calamities of war. But if peace has blessings, she has blotches upon her fair face—corruptions, rottenness, utter abominations, cowardices, and such-like; cheatings and wrongs, money-makers in the ascendant, Bureaucracy and Mammon-worship, the faces of the poor ground. Why, in the face of these evils, do we prate of the blessings of peace?

"Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone by,

When the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like

swine;

When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men lie.

Peace in her vineyard-yes! but a company forges the wine!"

Now these corruptions of peace, in society as it is at present constructed, are really eased off by war. In war there is a spirit and a brotherhood, a feeling that the rich and poor are kin to each other, a sympathy for a common object, which makes the great much more kind to the poor.

An uninterrupted prosperity, and a continuance in peace, may put a nation very forward in the arts and sciences; but they may, at the same time, and indeed they often will, render it luxurious, selfish, arrogant, and unfeeling. To individuals, as well as to nations, moderate misfortune is a great good and a clear gain: prosperity is always a trial and a snare. Goldsmith, who clearly saw this, has embodied his sentiments in some vigorous lines in the Deserted Village: he tells us, that in too much prosperity, and consequent luxury, kingdoms

"to sickly greatness grown,

Boast of a florid vigour not their own:

At every draught large and more large they grow,
A bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe;

Till, sapped their strength, and every part unsound,
Down, down they sink, and spread a ruin round."

A great many of the statements we daily see in the newspapers show us that England is not free from this enervating luxury, and that we need all the supervision of the best thinkers and statesmen among us to correct the evils which this luxury creates. The sorrows and evils which it does create we have in this paper ticketed by the general title of "The Barbarities of Peace."

Among them we may fairly include the condition of the courts and alleys of our towns, and of the cottages of our labouring agricultural population. Mr. Bright, in one of his speeches at Rochdale, said perhaps rather too much when he asserted that the English agricultural labourer was the worst paid, worst fed, and most neglected and ignorant being he had met with. Upon the whole, there can be little question that the English peasant is better fed and better lodged than the French, Russian, or German peasant, although some assert that a German peasant is a very different being to his fellow agricultural labourer in England; but if we look upon England as a pre-eminently rich nation, then the condition of our peasant is a very bad one. It will need a wise head to remedy this; for unless an immense deal of capital, of machinery, and of educated skill, is brought to bear, the occupation of farming is not a paying one. The plan hinted at by Mr. Bright, of breaking all the larger estates into small ones, and of a legal re-division of the land, would do no good. A farm-labourer is not poor because he does not till his own land, but because the price of corn is low, and always will be low whilst we have to compete with Swedish, French, Russian, Egyptian, and American corn-growers. The price in the market of a quarter of wheat always rules the rate of the agricultural labourer's wages. If the farmer got more, he would give more, because he would be incited by the reward to spend more labour on his fields, and to make them produce more. But while the pay of the labourer is beyond the landlord's control, the cottages of labourers are not; and