or from without. Her real enemies are the cravens who see the mirage of armies navigating the Thames, and hovering over the Strand. It is not the weak and the defenceless who cry for bayonets, and steamers, and martello towers: it is the hypocritical coward that is to wield the one, and to occupy the other. When a foolish prince, now an exile from his country, had uttered his naval menaces against our peaceful shores, the nation trembled at the sound, the Government looked pale, and even now the coward-note has scarcely ceased its wail. Were every nation thus to arm itself to the teeth, under the influence of visionary dangers, we should follow the example in the protection of our properties and our homes. The domestic circle is more exposed to the rapacity of the thief and the violence of the burglar, than is the national domain, even in seasons of war, to the depredation of foreign enemies;—and yet we cut no ditches round our dwellings, erect no watch-towers on our roofs, and hire no sentinel to give us warning. Within the circumvallation of the laws,-with the watch-dog as our guardian, and with Providence as our defence, we may dismiss that unmanly fear which is a greater evil than the calamity which it dreads. Let the nation, then, follow the example of the individual. Centuries have rolled away since the foot of an invader has polluted our shores; and, without wooden walls or standing armies, centuries will still pass in happy tranquillity, if we but practise what we pretend to believe, and cultivate in universal charity the arts and the studies of peace. What a glorious future would the cessation of war, and the reduction of armies, provide for the rising generation, and with what joy would the living generation die could they but hail it even in the distance!-the world one family-nations one brotherhood, the lion lying down with the lamb, and nothing to hurt or destroy in the holy mountain.

In the early portion of this Article we have endeavoured to support the doctrines of the Peace Congress by the authority of a few distinguished individuals who were not likely to be carried away by the seducing influence of sentiment and feeling; but so inveterate have we found the prejudice of educated and amiable individuals, and even of men who profess to cling to the Christian's hopes, that we feel it necessary to appeal to a still greater number of authorities against war. There are few writers of the present day who have denounced war, and its causes and its palliations, with more eloquence than Dr. Chalmers. He describes war as "a scene of legalized slaughter," which, were it not for the poetry, and the music, and the pomp and splendour which accompany it, "could never have been seen in any other light than that of unmingled hatefulness." He elsewhere describes death in the battle field with all the power of genius, and all the feelings of philanthropy; and after giving his highest

Dr. Chalmers approves of the Peace Congress.

43

approbation to Peace Societies and Peace Congresses, he points out the steps by which these blessed views may be realized.

"Much," says he, " may be done to accelerate the advent of perpetual and universal peace, by a distinct body of men embarking their every talent, and their every acquirement, in the prosecution of this as a distinct object. This was the way in which, a few years ago, the British public were gained over to the cause of Africa. This is the way in which some other prophecies are at this moment hastening to their accomplishment; and it is in this way, I apprehend, that the prophecy of universal peace may be indebted for its speedier fulfilment -to the agency of men selecting this as the assigned field on which their philanthropy shall expatiate. I could not fasten on another course more fitted to call forth every variety of talent, and to rally round it so many of the generous and accomplished sons of humanity, and to give each of them a devotedness and a power far beyond whatever could be sent into the hearts of enthusiasts by the mere impulse of literary ambition."

And in another place he points out the method by which this great object should be pursued.

"Let one," says he, "take up the question of war in its principle, and make the full weight of his moral severity rest upon it, and upon all its abominations. Let another take up the question of war in its consequences, and bring his every power of graphical description to the task of presenting to an awakened public, an impressive detail of its cruelties and horrors. Let another neutralize the poetry of war, and dismantle it of all those bewitching splendours which the hand of misguided genius has thrown over it. Let another tell, with irresistible argument, how the Christian ethics of a nation are at one with the Christian ethics of its humblest individual. Let another pour the light of modern speculation into the mysteries of trade, and prove that not a single war has been undertaken for any of its objects, where the millions and millions that were lavished on the cause have not all been cheated away from us by the phantom of an imaginary interest. This may look to many like the Utopianism of a romantic anticipation; but I shall never despair of the cause of truth addressed to a Christian public, when the clear light of principle can be brought to every one of its positions, and when its practical and conclusive establishment forms one of the most distinct of heaven's prophecies, 'that men shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks, and that nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'

Sir Robert Peel has expressed the "hope that one great and most beneficial effect of the advancement of civilisation, the diffusion of knowledge, and the extension of commerce, will be the reducing within their proper dimensions, of the fame and the merit and the reward of military achievements, and that juster notions of the moral dignity of, and the moral obligations due to, those who apply themselves to preserve peace, and avoid the eclat of war, will be the consequence." In a similar strain the

immortal Washington, the hero of peace, has contrasted the merits of the philanthropist and the warrior. "How much more delightful," says he, "to an undebauched mind, is the task of making improvements on the earth, than all the vain glory which can be obtained from ravaging it by the most uninterrupted course of conquests! How pitiful in the eye of reason and religion, is that false ambition which desolates the world with fire and sword, compared with the mild virtues of making our fellowmen as happy as their frail condition and perishable nature will permit them to be." "After much occasion," says Dr. Franklin, "to consider the folly and mischief of a state of warfare, and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think there never has been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace. All wars are follies-very expensive and very mischievous ones. When will nations be convinced of this, and settle their differences by arbitration? Were they to do it even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by fighting and destroying each other." The illustrious warrior, Prince Eugene, assures us "that a military man becomes so sick of blood and crimes in war, that in peace he is averse to recommence them." "I wish," he adds, "that the first minister who is called to decide on peace and war had only seen actual service, what pains would he not take to seek in mediation and compromise the means of avoiding the effusion of so much blood." "The fabric," says Robert Hall, of the warrior's fame is cemented. with blood; and if his name is wafted to the ends of the earth, it is in the shrill cry of suffering humanity, in the curses and imprecations of those whom his sword has reduced to despair." In reply to a toast given in honour of his victories in India, to his fellow-officers in the British army, Sir Harry Smith said, "Gentlemen, ours is a damnable profession ;" and even Napoleon, in a moment of remorse after his bloodiest battle, exclaimed-"War is the trade of barbarians!"

We cannot close these observations without referring to those causes which create and foster in man that love of adventure and those habits of cruelty, which throw a halo round the red target of war, inciting the young to its bloody mysteries, and hardening the old in their military frenzy. When we witness, for the first time, the cruel experiments which science sometimes demands from her votaries, the heart sickens at the sight, and the head turns instinctively away from the living agonies before it. Soon, however, does the heart resume its normal tranquillity, and as soon does the eye return to the sight of pain. Need we wonder, then, that the child accustomed, almost from his birth, to the infliction of pain, and deriving his

Cruelty of our River and Field Sports.

45

earliest pleasure from the extinction of life, should in his riper years boast of the number and magnitude of his cruelties, and thus by an easy transition pass to the atrocities of war, as a step in advance, or as the climax, of his early achievements.

It is painful to remember how we first exercised our dominion over living nature, by the capture and destruction of the loveliest insects, and how we arrested the industrious bee in its honest labours, and even when in our own service, by robbing it at once of its life and its treasure. By the hazel wand, with its line of cord and its hook of steel, we committed havoc among the minnows, before the spring-gun had introduced us to the more lethal tube which was guilty of the blood of sparrows. Though but a youthful spectator in the scene, we gaze with delight on the varied feats of the angler. We watch him in the stream and in the pool, impaling the writhing worm upon his line-sacrificing one life to take another; and with the bright sun above him, and the dove-like sky around, and rock and woodland demanding his admiration of peaceful nature, he terminates his every act of pleasure by every variety of pain. The life which he has caught is rudely dashed out against the rock, or crushed by his living hand, or allowed to pass away in the slow and fluttering agonies of pain. Thus hardened for the future, our river hero is soon introduced to a still higher sport, and still bloodier gambols. The companion of the licensed fisherman, or of the lawless poacher, he is invited to the romantic drama of the sunning of the water by day, and the burning of it by night, in which the picturesque grandeur of rock and stream, and the sublimity of worlds in the canopy above, form a strange contrast with the work of death below. Frightened by the ruddy blaze, the salmon seeks for shelter beneath the stones and cliffs, or lies stupified beside them, till the river Neptune, with his three-pronged trident, dashes it into the flesh of his glittering prey, and casts it in triumph to the shore.

Harrowing as is the sight itself, and painful as it is in all its details and accessories, we are yet disposed to regard our river sports as more humane in their character, and less cruel in their practice, than those of the gun and the chase. We cannot indeed affirm, as some have done, that ichthyological life is less painfully surrendered than that of the mammalia, though our early cruelties make us indulge in the belief that the amount of suffering is proportional to the magnitude of the sufferer. Yet when we see the salmon stretched on the ground without a wound, and slain without the shedding of blood, our sympathy is immeasurably less than that which is called forth when we scan the stately hart, with its glazed eye and its quivering limb, or the comely roe-deer perforated by the rifle, or torn by the

ferocious hound. Our animal associations, too, have a powerful influence over our sympathies. Ourselves a genus in the mammiferous community, we naturally associate their sufferings with our own. The shrieks of the female orang-outang, so singularly human, are said to thrill through the very heart of her pursuers; and we would not envy the sportsman whose domestic sympathies are not awakened when he has slain the hart in the presence of his mate, or the tender hind in the act of caressing its offspring. The death of a sportive fawn, killed by the random shot of the deer-stalker, will call forth a deeper feeling than the demise of 3000 salmon caught in one net by the Arctic fisherman. But though we have thus offered a palliative of flyfishing as less inhuman than some of our other amusements, we have no toleration for the doctrine that the nervous system of cold-blooded animals is but little sensitive, and that the hook pulls only against a piece of unfeeling cartilage. Sir Humphry Davy, in his Salmonia, tells us under the cognomen of HALIEUS, that he has caught pikes with four or five hooks in their mouths, and that these hooks "had no other effect than that of serving as a sort of sauce piquante, urging them to seize another morsel of the same kind!" Now, we who have tasted the sauce of a hook, which, without our consent, entered one side of the cheek, and was cut out of the other, can assure HALIEUS that this is the least savoury of our steel medicines; and, with experience on our side, we are not indisposed to transfer to him Lord Byron's sentence upon Isaac Walton :

"The quaint old cruel coxcomb, in his gullet

Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it."

With much sympathy, however, for the young sportsman, and still more for his prey, we must enter our protest against the monstrous cruelty of driving the five-pronged clodding leister into the naked back of a salmon, whether dazzled by a sunbeam, or paralyzed by the nocturnal fire. There is no valour in the sanguinary deed. It is a midnight burglary enhanced by murder. It is a violation of that truce which darkness concedes to animal life, an invasion of that rest from suffering which dumb nature might have looked for without an appeal to the mercy of her viceroy. It is unmanly too-for there is no reciprocity of strife or skill,-no competition between the devices of the deceiver, and the counter sagacity of his victim-no conflict between brute instinct and sharpened reason. When the otter bites his antagonist, and is bit by him in return:—when the vigorous fish outmanoeuvres his captor-snaps his line, or exhausts his strength, or pulls him into the stream: or when the acute senses of the stag are marshalled against the practised