The second resolution in favour of international arbitration was ably advocated by M. Visschers of Brussels, in an elaborate oration, and supported by Dr. George Beckwith, U.S., and by our eloquent countryman, the Rev. John Burnet.

At the second sitting of the Congress, on the 23d, very interesting letters of adhesion were read to the meeting from M. Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, member of the Institute and of the Chamber of Deputies; from M. Carnot, a member of the same Chamber, and the son of the illustrious Carnot, whose brilliant career has already been traced in the pages of this Journal. Letters were also read from M. Victor Tracy, formerly minister of marine in France, and from General Subervie, general of division in the French army, and member of the National Assembly. "Of all the scourges," said the general, "that can afflict the world, war is the most terrible. I have assisted at all the sanguinary dramas which desolated Europe for more than twenty years, and amid fields of battle I have often reproached Providence for not arresting the effusion of the people's blood, the innocent victims of the passions and the ambition of those who call themselves the masters of our destiny."

The propriety of urging upon European governments the necessity of a system of international disarmament, was powerfully advocated by Mr. Cobden, and supported by M. Pompery of Paris, Mr. Ewart, M.P., Mr. Macgregor, M.P., and Don Jose Segundo Flores, Professor of Political Economy at Madrid; and the right of every state to regulate its own affairs was eloquently maintained by Mr. Henry Vincent, M. Garnier, the Rev. J. Burnet, and M. Emile Girardin. The Rev. H. Garnett, a negro and escaped slave, addressed the meeting; and the Rev. Frederick Crowe from Guatemala in Central America, gave the meeting an account of his experience of the demoralizing habits of the barracks, of his imprisonment for refusing to serve as a Spanish militiaman, and of the impressment as it were of the slaves captured in the Middle Passage, to serve in our West India black regiments.

Previous to commencing the business of the third sitting of the Congress, the Secretary intimated that he had received a letter of sympathy and approval from the Archbishop of Dublin, and an apology for his absence from M. Victor Hugo. At this moment fifteen of the Parisian workmen, who had been sent over to study the Exhibition of Industry, entered the Hall, and were received on the platform. Their names and professions were read over by Mr. Vincent, and one of them, M. Pierre Vinsard, a working engraver, delivered with much spirit an excellent address in French, pointing out the injury which was inflicted on the working man, and asserting that the annihila

The President's Closing Address.

33

tion of war and pauperism could be effected only by a sincere and durable union among the people of all nations.

After an able speech on the general topics of the Congress by Dr. Creizenach of Frankfort, Mr. Charles Gilpin moved the fourth resolution, which condemns the negotiating of loans for the prosecution of war. It was seconded by Mr. Edward Miall, in a speech of great mental vigour, every word of which told upon the audience. Mr. Samuel Gurney, Mr. Cobden, Mr. Buckingham, and M. Jules Avigdor, banker, Nice, brought forward new arguments in support of the resolution. M. De Cormenin urged the necessity of sending to Parliament, members who were the friends of Peace; and Rev. Mr. Massie urged upon the female portion of the audience, the duty of educating their children in the cause of Peace; and he intimated the offer of a friend to add £500 to a fund of £20,000, to enable Mr. Cobden to carry on an agitation for international arbitration.

After an eloquent speech, which electrified the audience, from Mr. Elihu Burritt, who described with singular power the Great Exhibition and its influence upon society, excellent speeches were made by Mr. Coignet of Lyons, Dr. Scherzer of Vienna, and particularly by M. Bouvet of the National Assembly of France, who in a moment of great temptation and cruel insult had been induced to accept a challenge to a duel which had a fatal termination. In his admirable speech on the objects of the Congress, he expressed with much feeling the remorse which he felt for the violation of his principles, and the calamity to which he alluded.

The business of the Congress was now hastening to a close. A resolution moved by Mr. Sturge, that a Congress of the Friends of Peace should be held next year, was carried by acclamation; and after it was announced, amid the cheers of the audience, that Mr. G. Hatfield of Manchester, intended to have a silver medal struck at his own expense, and presented to the French workmen who had attended the Congress, as a memorial of the satisfaction which their visit had created, Sir David Brewster closed the sittings of the Congress with the following observations:

"In closing this Congress, allow me to congratulate you on the peace and order which have marked its proceedings. I have had occasion to attend many large public assemblies, and several in this Hall, but I was never before present at a meeting when the Chairman was not even once called upon to exercise his authority, either over the audience or the speaker. It is not a less agreeable source of congratulation, that the gentlemen to whose eloquent and argumentative speeches we have listened with so much pleasure, have never violated the regulations laid down for the guidance of the meeting, and have

VOL. XVI.

NO. XXXI.

C

never allowed their feelings to carry them out of their proper sphere of peaceful discussion into the field of political argument, within which we should at every step have been treading upon thorns. Although I had read much and thought much, as all of you must have done, on the important topics to which our attention has been directed, I carry away from this Congress, as I trust all of you do, many new views, and many new arguments in favour of universal peace. But while you have yourselves been impressed with the deep importance of this cause, as the cause of humanity and religion, I hope that you will regard it as a sacred duty to teach the lessons of peace in your families, and to propagate them throughout the sphere over which your influence extends. It is only by enlisting the young in our service, and preserving their minds from the poison that lurks under their amusements, as well as under the prevailing system of education, that we can hope to attain the grand object at which we aim. To you, gentlemen, whose daily work it is to teach and exemplify the doctrines of peace and charity, I need not offer any suggestions for your guidance; but you will perhaps allow me to say, that while much may be done for our cause from the pulpit, more may be expected from the school. It is by the selection of proper teachers, and the choice of proper school-books for the institutions you superintend, or over which you have any control, that you are most likely to check that admiration of military achievements which is so strong in the young, and which, when fostered by the poet and the historian, exercises such an influence over them in after life. Were our youth better instructed than they are in the popular departments of physical and natural science, subjects with which no deeds of heroism or personal adventure are associated; and were every school to have a museum, containing objects of natural history, and specimens of the fine and the useful arts, the amusements of the school would assume a different character, and the scholars would go into active life better fitted for those peaceful professions to which ere long they must be confined. But there is still another class whose active interest in the cause of peace I would fain secure. If there are mothers in this assembly, as I can testify there are fathers, whose sons have been sent, in the service of their country, to the regions of pestilence or of war, I need not solicit their assistance in propagating the doctrines of peace. They will proffer it in tears-in tears shed in the recollection of those anxious days in which they have followed in their hazardous career the objects of their deepest love-now sinking under a burning sunnow prostrate under tropical disease-now exposed to the sword of the enemy. If there are others in the fair assemblage which graces this Hall, whose sympathies have not yet been excited, and whose feelings have not been harrowed by the calamities of war, I would implore their active exertions in our cause. Should it be their destiny to become mothers themselves, they have much at stake in the question of peace or war; and, feeling as woman ever feels, a deep interest in the cause of humanity, I would solicit her gentle influence over those stronger and less susceptible natures with which her own is destined to blend. With the expression of this wish I close our proceedings, trusting

that we shall all meet again at our next Congress, with fresh zeal and ardour in the cause. But should we not all meet again, should some of us, from whose hour-glass are hastening 'life's last ebbing sands;' or should some of you who grace the panorama of youth and beauty now before me, be summoned from this world of strife to that world of rest, before the autumn's sun has performed another of its annual rounds,— should this be our fate or yours, you will not be the less welcome to the land of the lamb and the dove, that you have breathed your last as a friend or as a member of the Congress of Peace."

After a vote of thanks had been passed to the President, VicePresident, and Secretaries, the proceedings of the Congress terminated.

In return for the great kindness and hospitality with which the English members had been welcomed in Brussels, Paris, and Frankfort, the English delegates gave a grand soirée to their foreign friends, in Willis's Rooms, on Friday evening. The company which assembled amounted to more than 800, including individuals of all nations. A great number of ladies graced the meeting, and much interest was excited by the French workmen, the representatives of large bodies of the French people, who mingled in familiar intercourse with their English neighbours.

Another soirée, but one necessarily smaller, was given at his own house by Charles Hindley, Esq., M.P. for Newcastle-underLyne, and President of the Peace Society, on Saturday evening; and the Friends of Peace separated with an anxious desire to meet again, and resume the great work of humanity in which they had been so agreeably and successfully engaged.

Having thus given our readers a brief and general view of the Peace Societies and Congresses that have hitherto assembled, we shall now submit to them, as men of the world and as Christians, some views which every member of a political and religious community, whether male or female, is bound seriously to ponder, to reject as false, or to receive as true. To men of the world it would be folly to address any other arguments than those of reason and humanity. Their religion, whatever it may be, is ever in humble subordination to their interests and passions. It may be used to promote the one and palliate the other, but it never has power to regulate or subdue them.

In a period of profound tranquillity, a territorial dispute, or a claim of redress for real or imaginary injuries, has placed in a hostile attitude two powerful nations. Negotiation fails, and war becomes the arbiter of justice or of feeling. The bloody mandate issues from the frantic monarch. Bellona, with her purple scourge, seats herself upon his throne, and the Furies become the ministers of his power. The war steamer is commissioned to burn and to destroy. The privateer-the pirate

ship of civilisation, is launched to rob and to murder. Life, wherever it breathes-on the unruffled ocean or on the rugged shore, perishes under the bloody cutlass; and property, wherever secured the gold in the rich man's coffers, and the savings of the poor man's industry, become the prize of the ocean vulture. The emigrant ship, bearing her voluntary exiles to a distant shore, has no passport from the tyrant of the deep; and the homebound sail, bleached by a tropic sun, freighted with the riches of luxuriant climes, and carrying back to their native land the adventurous merchant and the wealthy colonist, shares the same fate as if equipped for battle. Nor are the horrors of war less felt in the defenceless hamlet, the commercial seaport, or the exposed metropolis. Red from the furnace the fatal missiles crush the habitations of living men, and the consecrated shrine-the receptacles of wisdom-the temples of knowledgethe records of property, and the granaries laden with the food of man, perish in the general conflagration.

Yet these are but the harbingers of war, the mutterings of its distant thunder, the first ripples on its sea of blood. It is in the siege, in the sack, and in the battle-field, that war appears in her gorgon form-hideous in her frowns, and gigantic in her crimes. Exhausted with famine and with resistance, the devoted city receives the victor amid its ruins:-Massacre and pillage track his angry steps:-Neither age nor youth, nor sex nor rank, nor innocence, disarm the avenger. Wealth only is spared, that it may barter its life-blood for gold. Children are cast into the flames: Infants at the breasts of their dying mothers are stabbed in their arms, and the streets run with Christian blood, shed by Christian hands. The rivers and the ravines are choked with the dead and the dying; and the shriek of violated virtue, and the frantic cry of widows and of orphans, mingle with the crash of falling ruins, and the crackling of burning habitations.

Less agitated by passion, and less stained by crime, is the wider scene of the battle-field. There, science and martial skill, in cool deliberation, point the instruments of death. Column meets column in the bloody game-lance struggles with lance, and spear with spear-and the brave fall under the stroke of the brave. In the individual and equal struggle, where death pauses for his victim, and the flashing eye guides its weapon to the heart, can the living man ever efface from his dreams the death-stare which confessed the victor, or the form divine which he disfigured and destroyed?-can he mingle in the social circle with the childless mother, or with the widow or the orphan which he has made? He may, perchance, but he may never meet them in the paradise of the just. In the mingled affray, on the contrary, where the hand of the Ishmaelite soldier is against every man, and every hand against him, the dying hero