The way, then, is clear. We must christianize public sentiment on this subject, and get from the mass of the people such a demand for the settlement of all national disputes without the sword, as no rulers in Christendom will dare or long desire to refuse. This demand would in time, if not very soon, work out the consummation we seek. It would lead to the gradual disuse of war by the adoption of far better means for the adjustment of difficulties between nations. They might, if they would, agree among themselves before fighting, incomparably better than after; but if not, they might either accept the offer of mediators, or refer the points in issue to umpires. Let them beforehand stipulate for such a mode of final adjustment. Let them expressly agree to have all their future controversies adjusted in the last resort by some form of arbitration, to abide by the decision of their referees, and ask, if dissatisfied, only a new hearing, or a different reference, thus making sure of a settlement in every case without a resort to arms. Such a measure, once adopted in good faith by any two nstions, would be pretty sure, under God, to prevent all war between them; and their example would probably be followed in time by the other governments of Christendom, and thus unite them all at last in a League of Perpetual Peace.

How can we secure a consummation so desirable? By the power of a christianized public opinion enlisted strongly in its favor. Let such an opinion diffuse its omnipresent influence through every community; let it speak to rulers by votes and petitions; let its voice be heard through the press, from the pulpit and the rostrum, in the school and the family, on the farm and in the snop, in store and street, in the counting room and market place, in the whole intercourse of men throughout all the ramifications of society.

Such a public opinion Christians ought to form in every Christian land. Followers of the Prince of Peace, it is their appropriate business; and, having in the principles of the gospel, in the promises and providence of God, ample means of success, they might, if they would only gird themselves in earnest for the work, leaven ere long all Christendom with such sentiments on this subject as would render war between any of its nations morally impossible, and lead in time to the adoption of such substitutes for it as must obviate every plea of necessity for its blind and brutal arbitra

ments.

MANY FACTS IN SMALL COMPASS.-The number of languages spoken is 4,064. The number of men is about equal to the number of women.The average of human life is 33 years. One quarter die before the age of 7; one half before the age of 17. To every 1000 persons, one only reaches 100 years, and not more than one in 500 will reach 80 years. There are on the earth 1,000,000,000 inhabitants. Of these, 33,333,333 die every year, 91,824 die every day, 7,780 every hour, and 60 per minute, or one every second. These losses are about balanced by an equal number of births. The married are longer lived than the single, and above all, those who observe a sober and industrious couduct. Tall men live longer than

short ones. Women have more chances of life, previons to the age of fifty years, than men, but fewer after. The number of marriages are in the proportion of 76 to 100. Marriages are more frequent after the equinoxes, that is, during the months of June and December. Those born in spring are generally more robust than others. Births and deaths are more frequent by night than by day. The number of men capable of bearing arms is one fourth of the population.

HAVOC OF LIFE BY WAR.

It is difficult to conceive what fearful havoc this custom has made of human life. Some of its incidental ravages seem to defy all belief. It has at times entirely depopulated immense districts. In modern, as well as ancient times, large tracts have been left so utterly desolate, that a traveller might pass from village to village, even from city to city, without finding a solitary inhabitant. The war of 1756 waged in the heart of Europe, left in one instance no less than twenty contiguous villages without a single man or beast. The Thirty years' war, in the 17th century, reduced the population of Germany from 12,000,000 to 4,000,000,-three fourths; and that of Wirtemburg from 500,000 to 48,000,-more than nine tenths! Thirty thousand villages were destroyed; in many others the population entirely died out; and in districts, once studded with towns and cities, there sprang up immense forests.

Look at the havoc of sieges-in that of Londenderry 12,000 soldiers, besides a vast number of inhabitants; in that of Paris, in the 16th century, 30,000 victims of mere hunger; in that of Malplaquet, 34,000 soldiers alone; in that of Ismail, 40,000; of Vienna 70,000; of Ostend, 120,000; of Mexico, 150,000; of Acre, 300,000; of Carthage, 700,000; of Jerusalem 1,000,000!

Mark the slaughter of single battles-at Lepanto, 25,000; at Austerlitz. 30,000; at Eylau, 60,000; at Waterloo and Quatre Bras, one engagement in fact, 70,000; at Borodino, 80,000; at Fontenoy, 100,000; at Arbela, 300,000; at Chalons, 300,000 of Attilla's army alone; 400,000 Usipetes slain by Julius Caesar in one battle, and 430,000 Germans in another.

Take only two cases more. The army of Xercxs, says Dr. Dick, must have amounted to 5,283,320; and, if the attendants were only one third as great as common at the present day in Eastern countries, the sum total must have reached nearly six millions. Yet in one year, this vast multitude was reduced, though not entirely by death, to 300,000 fighting men; and of these only 3,000 escaped destruction. Jenghiz-khan, the terrible ravager of Asia in the 13th century, shot 90,000 on the plains of Nessa, and massacred 200,000 at the storming of Kharasm. In the district of Herat, he butchered 1,600,000, and in two cities with their dependencies, 1,760,000 During the last twenty-seven years of his long reign, he is said to have massacred more than half a million every year; and in the first fourteen

years, he is supposed, by Chinese historians, to have destroyed not less than eighteen millions; a sum total of 32,000,000 in forty-one years!

In any view, what a fell destroyer is war! Napoleon's wars sacrificed full six millions, and all the wars consequent on the French Revolution, some nine or ten millions. The Spaniards are said to have destroyed in forty-two years more than twelve millions of American Indians. Grecian wars sacrificed 15,000,000; Jewish wars, 25,000,000; the wars of the twelve Csars, 30,000,000 in all; the wars of the Romans before Julius Cæsar, 60,000,000; the wars of the Roman Empire, of the Saracens and the Turks, 60,000,000 each; those of the Tartars, 80,000,000; those of Africa, 100,000,000! "If we take into consideration," says the learned Dr. Dick, "the number not only of those who have fallen in battle, but of those who have perished through the natural consequences of war, it will not perhaps be overrating the destruction of human life, if we affirm, that one tenth of the human race has been destroyed by the ravages of war; and, according to this estimate, more than fourteen thousand millions of human beings have been slaughtered in war since the beginning of the world." Edmund Burke went still further, and reckoned the sum total of its ravages, from the first, at no less than THIRTY FIVE THOUSAND MILLIONS.

POPULAR PLEAS FOR WAR.

1. 1 may be told that nations have a right to resist oppression, and to rebel, if unjust laws are imposed. But who is to decide whether the law is unjust or not?- the party imposing the law, or the party obeying it? Not the party imposing the law, or we were wrong in our Revolution. So Greece, Poland, South America, every free state upon earth. Nor can you give to the subject this right of adjudication; for then you would annihilate all government. If an individual or a community may shoot down the man who comes delegated to enforce a law, because they do not like it, "chaos and old night" would again set up their kingdom on earth. The Pennsylvania and Massachusetts rebellions would be right; the Baltimore and New York mobs would be right.

2. It is said, also, that a man may fight for his liberty, and is solemnly, religiously bound to fight for it. How much liberty may he fight for? How much must he be oppressed before he may "render evil for evil? Let the amount be defined. This cannot be done. No man can tell how deep the chain shall have cut into the flesh, before the sufferer may stab his master. It may be a tax of three cents per pound on tea; it may be a stain upon that airy nothing, national honor; or it may be slavery in its worst forms.

3. I shall be asked if defensive war is wrong. But what is defensive war? Can it be defined? Is it not an intangible idea in the minds of ̧ most persons? But granting that revenge, retaliation, rendering evil for

evil, were the spirit of Christianity, it would be a very uncertain rule to act upon. Indeed, it could not be acted upon at all; caprice and passion alone would decide the justice or injustice of the war. What nation has ever taken up arms, which has not stoutly contended that she was maintaining her rights? Not one. What, then, is defensive war? Why does this intangible idca float in the minds of so many, that defensive wars are right, when a defensive war cannot be defined? The truth is, men see wars right, when they think that they are for their own interest.

4. Shall I be told that a nation may be insulted, if it will not fight? I answer, it insults itself, if it does; a far greater evil.-STEBIENS.

GLANCE AT THE WASTE OF WAR.

War is the great impoverisher of nations. By its uncertainities and sudden changes, its general derangement and stagnation of business, its withdrawal of laborers from productive employments, and its formation of lazy and improvident habits, it cuts the very sinews of a nation's prosperity, and prevents, to an extent almost incredible, the accumulation of wealth among the mass of the people. When our own population was only fifteen or sixteen millions, our annual production was estimated at $1,400,000,000; and, if we suppose war to diminish this amount barely one fifth, the loss would be no less than $280,000,000 a year. At such a rate, how vast would be the loss from this cause alone to the whole world with its 1,200,000,000 inhabitants!

Consider how much the war-system costs even in peace. The amount of money wasted on fortifications and ships, on arms and ammunition, on monuments and other military demonstrations, it is quite impossible to calculate. France alone, with a territory not so large as some of our single states, has more than 120 fortified places; and a single one of her war monuments cost $2,000,000. How many such in all Christendom! Millions of dollars have we ourselves expended on a single fort, and a hundred millions more would hardly suffice to complete and arm the whole circle of our projected fortifications.

From 1816 to 1834, eighteen years of peace, our national expenses amounted to $464,000,000, of which nearly $400,000,000, or about six sevenths of the whole, went for war purposes! Besides all this, Judge Jay reckoned, some twenty years ago, "the yearly aggregate expenses of our militia not much, if any, short of fifty millions." The annual expenses of England for war-purposes, including interest on her war-debt, average more than $220,000,000; and Richard Cobden, after careful and extensive enquiries, came in 1848 to the conclusion that the support of the war-system was then costing Europe, in a time of peace, one thousand million dollars a year, besides the interest in her war-debts which amounted to TEN THOUSAND MILLIONS!

Look at the actual cost of some wars. From 1688 to 1815, a period of

127 years, England spent 65 in war, three more than in peace. The war of 1688 increased her expenditures, in nine years, $180,000,000. The war of the Spanish succession cost, in eleven years, more than $300,000,000; the Spanish war of 1739, in nine years, $270,000,000; the seven years' war of 1756, $560,000,000; the American war of 1775, $680,000,000, in eight years; the French Revolution war of nine years from 1793, $2,320,000,000. During the war against Bonaparte from 1803 to 1815, England raised by taxes $3,855,000,000, and by loans $1,940,000,000; in all, $5,795,000,000, or an average of $1,322,082 every day! For 20 years from 1797, she spent for war-purposes alone more than one million dollars every day! During ninety days, before and after the battle of Waterloo, she is supposed to have spent an average of about five millions a day. During seven wars, lasting in all sixty-five years, she borrowed $4,170,00,000, and raised by taxes, $5,949,000,000; $10,119,000,000 in all. The wars of all Europe from 1793 to 1815, twenty-two years, cost some $15,000,000,000, and probably wasted full twice as much more in other ways, thus making a grand total of more than forty thousand millions of dollars!

There is no end to calculations like these. All the contributions of modern benevolence are scarce a drop of the bucket in comparison with what is continually wasted for war-purposes. We stared at the first suggestion of a railway across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific; but a single year's cost of the war-system to Christemdom would build that road, and two more round the globe.

ENGLISH INSANITY ABOUT A FRENCH INVASION.

Hitherto a salutary jealousy of large standing armaments has proved the best safeguard of England's civil and religious freedom; but now the country seems so completely duped with the terror and suspicion which designing men have succeeded in inspiring, that it seems prepared to acquiesce in anything that may be proposed under the name of defence, however monstrous in design, however extravagant in cost, however fraught with peril to our future destinies.

Not satisfied with expending £30,000,000 a year upon our army and navy; not satisfied with having drawn some 100,000 of our young men into that vortex of foppery and dissipation, known as the volunteer movement; our panic-mongers, a few months ago, succeeded in inducing the Govern ment to appoint a commission of naval and military officers to inquire "into the present state, condition, and sufficiency of the fortifications existing for the defence of the United Kingdom, and into the most effectual means of rendering the same complete." These worthies have presented their Report, in which they recommend that £12,000,000 be immediately expended; not, let it be distinctly understood, for the defence of our coasts, but for the defence of merely ten arsenals and harbors, leaving all the rest of the coast wholly undefended, though it presents, as they acknowledge," an aggregate of 300 miles on which a landing may be effected." No man who has the slightest acquaintance with government works, will imagine for a moment that, if these fortifications are really undertaken, £12,000,000, or twice £12,000,000, will suffice to finish them, Once let them be commenced, and they will be like a stone fixed on the neck of