find that many missionaries know almost nothing of the principles of your Society, of the movements of the peace army, or of the many thrilling facts connected with the subject, as developed by the patient toil of the friends of the cause. There are pious, praying, working, and well-meaning missionaries, who stare at the man who ventures to say that war should soon cease, and that Christians should cast off its bloody robes. They think us fanatics; and why? Simply because they have not read, or reasoned, or reflected on the subject. Light radiates in all directions from its source; but it moves in straight lines. Media must therefore be used to change its course, or to reflect it on those objects which are obscured by intervening or obstructing bodies. Hold up all the reflectors you can, and may He who is "the Light of the world" bless you abundantly.

Hilo must do something for you this year. Your cause is dear to us. It is our cause; it is the cause of all men; it is the cause of God. I think we shall send you $100 by-and-bye from our native church; and if I feel able, I may send another $100 from my own private stipends. How I wish I could count you out thousands; but you and Christ will not despise "two mites." Our native church is struggling hard to build a good meetinghouse at a cost of $12,000. This is a heavy and almost crushing work; but we have commenced, the contracts are drawn, and the carpenters are at work. We shall, therefore, not be able to do all we wish for other objects; but your cause we cannot put off. Your reasoning is good; viz., if the mass of Christians will contribute to other societies, and leave yours to languish, it is the duty of the friends of Peace to devote MORE than they otherwise would to your cause. My own reflections lean to the same conclusion. I love the great sisterhood of benevolent societies. Strongly and deeply do I sympathize with them all, and ardently do I desire their success; but as we need to use all our funds this year in our church edifice, we shall probably devote to no other society except yours, and our own Hawaiian Missionary Association for sending the gospel to the dark isles beyond us.

With fervent prayer for the triumph of peace on earth and of good will among men, I remain most affectionately and faithfully yours in the gospel, TITUS COAN.

P. S. Your box of publications was received some time ago, and the contents are being sent abroad. Many thanks for them.

T. C.

READY FOR WAR. - VOLUNTEERS. About eighty survivors of the Maryland regiment in the war with Mexico recently assembled at Baltimore, and appointed a committee to proceed to Washington, and tender their services in the event of a war with the Mormons. A bill, too, has been unanimously passed by the Kentucky Legislature, and signed by the Governor, authorizing the Executive to raise a regiment of volunteers immediately, and tender their services to the President, to aid in suppressing the rebellion in Utah. Col. Crittenden, Major Hawkins, and others, all of Mexican war experience, are to be the officers.

It has been supposed, that experience of its evils would wean men from the war-mania; but it seems, from facts like the foregoing, that the evil no more cures itself than a drunken debauch reclaims the hard drinker. The cases are quite parallel.

A CURIOSITY IN WAR.

IN the siege of Sebastopol, there were some curiosities in the thoughts of the knowing ones. During the whole time it must have been known to every engineer, and to every intelligent officer, French or English, that the fortress on the north side of the harbor would be as impregnable after the fortresses on the south side of the harbor had been taken, as it was before. They must have known that the harbor of Sebastopol could not be entered by the ships of the allies after the surrender of the south part, any easier than before it. The sunken ships entirely blocked it up, and the forts on the north perfectly swept it. It must have been known that this fortification could not be taken by assault; that it would take several years to reduce it by starvation; and for such a purpose an army must be maintained there sufficient to meet and drive back the whole force of Russia. I do not say that, when the allied army entered the Crimea, and laid siege to these fortifications, any of them knew that the north side could not be taken after the south side had been abandoned. There was a confessed ignorance as to the strength of these fortresses on the part of the allies, when the investment commenced; but during the siege, the engineers must have found out this important fact.

It was under the following condition, therefore, that the generals commanding, the engineers, and every intelligent officer, pursued this game of war:1. They sent the soldiers to this labor in the ditches, to these stormings of the Malakoff and the Redan, to wounds and to death, and retended to glory in these deeds of valor and of skill, all the while knowing that Sebastopol would not be taken by these means, and these deaths of brave men. 2. When the southern part surrendered, they reported that Sebastopol was taken, and France and England made a glorification over it. Meantime it had not been taken, and could not be.

All this sacrifice of the lives of men had been going on by the command of officers who had certain knowledge that the fortress could not be taken! All this expense of money, suffering and human life, was dealt out by men who knew that it was all for nothing, but was the farce of war. What untold crimes attach to men and governments playing such a farce! The soldier was fighting in obedience to the call of his country! He, the ignorant, misused, deceived, brutalized man, with his flesh and bones in the soil of the Crimea, and his name obliterated from the earth! And the two successful commanders of each army died, also, as if the judgment of God rested on the chiefs of such a conspiracy against humanity.

This is acting over again, on a larger and varied scale, the farce of Mexico, which you related lately. A treaty was agreed on between Scott and Trist on the part of the Americans, and Santa Anna on the part of Mexico, in which there was a condition that a battle should be fought, the Americans should gain it, and after that the treaty should be consummated. It was done; but the Mexicans playing the farce too mischievously, made sad havoc among our soldiers. A.

SUICIDAL RECOIL OF THE SWORD;

ILLUSTRATED IN THE MUTINY OF THE SEPOYS AGAINST THE BRITISH RULE

IN INDIA.

THE terrible crisis that has come upon the British Empire in India, is one of the most impressive illustrations the world has ever seen of the truth of our Saviour's language, "They that take the sword, shall perish by the sword." We have taken the sword as almost exclusively the means of acquisition, and the instrument of our rule in India. From the first operations of Clive in the Carnatic, to the annexation of Pegu, and the absorption of Oude by Lord Dalhousie, we have seized territory after territory, without any pretence of right, save the right of the strongest. And what we have thus appropriated by violence, we have held by the same means. In reply to all remonstrances against injustice, to all warnings of retribution, to all prognostications of danger, we have pointed exultingly to the enormous army of native troops by which India was garrisoned, as if by virtue of that we could defy every augury, and brave every peril. To form, maintain, and discipline that army, has been the one object to which everything else has been sacrificed. Out of the immense revenue wrung from the oppressed people of Hindostan, twelve millions sterling ($72,000,000) were annually lavished on these pampered Sepoys. We boasted incessantly that these troops, when prepared by English discipline, and led by English officers, were irresistible, and would ere long carry the British arms triumphantly over the whole extent of that vast Asiatic continent. Not content with the prospective subjugation of all India, some of our journalists were beginning to talk, with perfect gravity, of initiating in China a similar process of gradual encroachment by annexation and conquest, until the countless millions of that empire should in like manner be brought into a state of suverainty to the British crown!

Nor was this extravagant ambition the sin of our rulers only. It is vain to disguise it, the national conscience had become utterly debauched by the long course of uninterrupted success that had attended an unprincipled policy in the East. It was impossible to awaken any feeling of disapproval or indignation in the heart of our people at any act, however flagrant, at any acquisition, however iniquitous, by which our great Oriental Empire was aggrandised. We resolutely shut our eyes to the injustice, for the sake of the glory. We closed our ears, in sullen indifference or insolent contempt, against the cry of dethroned monarchs and disinherited princes, who appealed to us against the acts of our representatives in India, by which their ancient rights were despoiled, and their hereditary kingdoms confiscated. We quieted the passing pang of remorse excited by any stray tone of anguish and bitterness that might by chance reach our ears, by certain cant phrases, which we had learnt to repeat by rote, wherewith to lull our consciences to sleep. And if any case of more than ordinary atrocity aroused some momentary feeling of alarm in the bosom of the religious public, the conductors of our religious press and returned Missionaries from India immediately came forward with an ointment wherewith to allay that threatening irritation, in the shape of an assurance that all the iniquities of our Indian authorities were the result of an inevitable necessity, and all tending to the furtherance of the Gospel and the glory of God!

In reply to the uneasy apprehensions sometimes expressed by persons of reflection and foresight, as to the stability of so anomalous an empire, acquired by such equivocal means, and expanding with such unexampled rapidity, we were referred, with a smile of mingled exultation and disdain,

to our splendid native army of 300,000 Sepoys. We have obtained India by the sword, and we shall hold it by the sword,' was the proud exulting boast. Of course they must be kept down consistently, steadily. And as for the means of keeping them down, trust our gallant Sepoys for that! With 300,000 good British bayonets in the hands of as brave a set of men as are to be found in the world, so long as they are officered by Englishmen, there is no fear of our Indian Empire. We must have no nonsense about constitutional rights, and yielding to complaints of grievances. It is no use treating Orientals with kindness. Teach them to fear you sufficiently, and all will be right. Nothing but the sword will do in India.' And the most insolent declaimers in this country against the military despotism of Russia and Austria loudly and laughingly applauded this doctrine as excellent gospel for India, however deadly a heresy it might be in Europe!

Well, the experiment has been tried - with what result we now see. We were not afraid to sit on the escape-valve, while adding year by year to the intensity of the pressure; and now the boilers have burst! The brave Sepoys, in the exuberance of our confidence in whom we refused to fear God, or to regard man, profiting by the lessons we have taught them at so prodigious cost, have turned our teaching against ourselves. We, a Christian nation, having a hundred millions of immortal souls placed under our care, as we affected to believe, by the will of Providence, undertook to instruct them in what? In the doctrines of peace on earth and goodwill towards men, which we professed to have received by supernatural revelation from heaven? Not at all. In the obligations of a purer and loftier morality, which taught respect for the rights and possessions of others, and sternly condemned rapacity, peculation and plunder? Not at all. Well, then, at least in the arts of civilization, in the cultivation of the soil, in the arts of industry, in the internal improvement of the country, in the development of its inexhaustible resources, by which we might at once have elevated the condition of the people, and enriched ourselves? Not at all. If these things have been done in any degree, they have been done sparingly, grudgingly, and with such glaring, monstrous inconsistencies between our conduct and professions as if we purposely intended to secure the rejection of our teaching. But the work we have done con amore, the instructions we have spared no pains to impart, upon which we have iavished unnumbered millions of treasure, and in respect of which we have watched over the progress of our pupils with ceaseless care, and exulted in their proficiency with genuine satisfaction, has been the science of destruction-the art of killing men with adroit skill, and with unshrinking courage. And having taught them the art, we have employed our adepts in working out our own will with most unscrupulous license over every part of India. Witness the iniquitous war in Affghanistan, the infamous annexation of Pegu, the recent expedition against Persia. And now this splendid military instrument, by which we have carried the terror of the British arms to the uttermost ends of the earth, and by which we were purposing in our hearts to achieve still greater exploits, has exploded in the hands of those who wielded it, and scattered destruction and havoc so horrible, as to make our blood almost freeze in our veins as we read the account. The atrocities committed by the insurgent Sepoys are so shocking, that men of the stoutest heart turn away in speechless terror and loathing from the page on "which their doings are described. We know not where, in the whole annals of history, they are to be paralleled, except (alas! that we should be obliged to say so) in the records of British rule in India.

Our readers may doubt this. Let us give them this one example, taken from no less trustworthy an authority than Mills' History of India. The

East India Company were in the habit formerly, as they are still under a modified system, of farming out the revenues of the provinces they had conquered to certain persons. In the time of Warren Hastings there was a man of the most infamous character, notoriously known to be such, named Deni Sing. Hastings himself acknowledged on his trial, that he "so well knew the character and abilities of Rajah Deni Sing, that he could easily conceive it was in his power both to commit great enormities, and to conceal the real ground of them from the British collectors in the district." Yet, notwithstanding this knowledge of the man, the Rajah having offered a large sum of money upwards of £40,000 he was appointed renter of the district of Dingapore. The following is the description given of the proceedings of this great agent of the British government, from the pen of Mr. Patterson, a gentleman in the Company's service, who was sent to inquire into the charges made against him: "The poor ryots, or husbandmen, were treated in a manner that would never gain belief, if it was not attested by the words of the Company; and Mr. Burke thought it necessary to apologise to their lordships for the horrid relation with which he would be obliged to harrow their feelings. The worthy Commissioner, Patterson, who had authenticated the particulars of this relation,had wished, for the credit of human nature, he might have drawn a veil over them; but as he had been sent to inquire into them, he must, in the discharge of his duty, state those particulars, however shocking they were to his feelings. The cattle and corn of the husbandman were sold for a third of their value, and their huts reduced to ashes. The unfortunate owners were obliged to borrow from usurers, that they might discharge their bonds, which had unjustly and illegally been extorted from them while they were in confinement; and such was the determination of the infernal fiend, Deni Sing, to have these bonds discharged, that the wretched husbandmen were obliged to borrow money, not at twenty, or thirty, or fonty, or fifty, but at SIX HUNDRED per cent., to satisfy him! Those who could not raise this money, were most cruelly treated. Cords were drawn tight round their fingers, till the flesh of the four on each hand was actually incorporated, and became one solid mass. The fingers were then separated by wedges of iron and wood driven in between them! Others were tied, two and two, by the feet, and thrown across a wooden bar, upon which they hung with their feet uppermost. They were then beaten on the soles of the feet till the toe-nails dropped off! They were afterwards beaten about the head till the blood gushed out of the mouth, nose, and ears. They were also flogged on the naked body with bamboo canes and prickly bushes, and, above all, with some poisonous weeds, which were of a caustic nature, and burnt at every touch. The cruelty of the monster who had ordered all this, had contrived how to tear the mind as well as the body. He had frequently had a father and a son tied naked to one another by the feet and arms, and then flogged till the skin was torn from the flesh; and he had the devilish satisfaction to know that every blow must hurt, for if one escaped the son, his sensibility was wounded by the knowledge he had that the blow had fallen upon his father. The same torture was felt by the father when he knew that every blow that missed him, had fallen upon his son." The treatment of the females could not be described. Dragged from the inmost recesses of their houses, which the religion of the country had made so many sanctuaries, they were exposed naked to public view. The virgins were carried to the Court of Justice, where they might naturally have looked for protection, but they now looked for it in vain; for, in the face of the ministers of justice, in the face of the spectators, in the face of the sun, those tender and modest virgins were brutally violated. The only difference between their treatment and that of their mothers was, that the