Such a course,

States, which desire to leave its support and protection. however its necessity may be regretted at the present time, is incomparably better than to kindle the fires of war throughout the land, and crimson the soil with human blood, which no sacrifice of national pride or material interests should be deemed too great to avert. Were this dreadful game once to commence, no one could foresee when it would be completed, or a tithe of the misery it would inflict; and before it would be played out, our boasted free government, and our professed Christianity, would become a by-word and a scorn throughout the world.

Let, then, each one strive to inculcate and bring into action the principles of peace and feelings of good-will towards all, in order that no circumstances may provoke those in power to commence hostilities, and that the statesmen of the North and of the South, instead of devising means for imbruing the hands of the people in each othor's blood, may agree in good faith upon terms of mutual concession and separation. May we not hope that such action will draw down the Divine blessing, and in the end bring about what is so greatly to be desired, a re-union of the dissevered States, and lead to the final extinguishment of the great national sin, for which, together with other departures from the law of righteousness, the country is now suffering correction."

Excellent advice; but we have little hope of its being heeded in the hot whirlwind of passion now sweeping, like a moral Sirocco, over the land. How long it way take to cool down this excitement, it is quite impossible to foresee; but sure are we that, sooner or later, combatants on both sides must cease from their work of actual slaughter, and betake themselves at length to the very measures of rational, peaceful adjustment for which we so earnestly pleaded from the start. To this they must come in the end; and the only possible good that can ever result from years or even ages of bloodshed, will be the willingness of the parties to do at last what they ought to have done, and might have done, far better before than after fight'ing.

WEAPONS OF WAR.-Notwithstanding the assumed superiority of the Armstrong gun in a late trial, the French authorities have pronounced decidedly against it. The cost of these guns is believed to be the chief objection to them. The British government has expended ten million dollars for Armstrong guns, and their average cost has thus far been $10,000, and nearly all of them are small field pieces. The large guns of this sort have never yet stood the tests required, and not a single gun larger than a 25 pounder has been received by the navy.

Cham, the clever caricaturist, is making himself very merry with the long range weapons now so generally in vogue. According to him, the word of command on drill, will be, "Attention, Spyglasses! Fire!" The new weapons enabling the hostile armies to fight at great distances, the vanquished army will be summoned by telegraph to surrender; and a victorious hero returned from the battle-field, and recounting the events of the campaign, when interrogated respecting the personal appearance of the people against whom he has been fighting, will be obliged to confess his inability to satisfy the curiosity of his hearers upon this point, as, though he saw the fire, he was quite out of sight of the enemy.

Mr. Heinlein has presented to the Bavarian government a new model of a rifled gun. A cavalry carbine of this model, with a barrel only 17 inches long, drove a ball through 8 inches of timber at 800 paccs.

An Italian has invented a new weapon, very light and very easily managed, destined to replace the lance used by cavalry and the bayonet of the infantry. Armed with this weapon the soldier may make terrible havoc in the ranks of the enemy without exposing himself to the action of any cutting weapon now in use the new arm, enabling its possessor to inflict mortal wounds at a distance of twenty-five feet.

EFFECTS OF WAR UNNATURAL.-Look at the abnormal condition of the world now. Has the Creator made provision for such an extra supply of men, that 50,000 Austrians and 40,000 Frenchmen may be killed in a day, and not destroy the ordained proportions and harmonies of male and female life? Has nature made any provision for our thus slaughtering one another, and slaughtering only one sex? No wonder that women in those countries are turned out into the fields and workshops to do men's labor. Thousands are driven to unnatural toil, and tens of thousands to crime. "War is hell," said Napoleon I.; and so say the laws of God. When will the human race learn that the only way to attain the highest prosperity and happiness is to keep inviolate the laws of nature?

THE FRENCH IN ALGIERS.-The army of occupation in Algiers, averaging generally 100,000 men, costs aunually $12,500,000. The government and police cost about $2,000,000. The civil administration and attempts at colonization cost about $1,500,000. There is at present an annual balance of $12,000,000 against the colony. It is a very expensive nursery for warriors; and it is grievous to think that the same energies could by peaceful and legitimate means be employed, without the necessity for a single Zouave, in reclaiming waste lands, or cultivating neglected territories in places such as Asia Minor, which are only waiting for the plow to give a hundred-fold return.

The French themselves do not seem to take to the place, for it is hardly correct to say that they are devoid of all colonial enterprise. The foundations laid in Canada and the Southern United States, attest some capabilities; but they are certainly small. In as far as respects Algeria, however, it is in vain that the French government offer sixty acres of fruitful land to every husbandman who can show that he has $60 to expend upon it ; in vain does it give a free deck passage to all who will go over; in vain does it prove by the pen of M. Carette that Algeria is nine times less populous than France, and sixteen times less populous than England; there are still less than 100,000 acres allotted, and the number of allottees, which in 1848 was only 3333, is but very gradually increasing. The candidates for the unappointed 90,000,000 acres arrive very slowly.

LOVE AND WAR.-An incident in the Crimean War." One scene in the battle of Inkermann," says a private soldier, "I can't withhold, as it effected me so much. In the heat of the battle, a young Russian officer made himself very conspicuous, and appeared indifferent to danger. He was young, tall, handsome, and indeed beautiful. Twice I had my rifle raised to shoot him; but my heart smote me, and I turned it in another direction. In an hour I saw him again, but, O, how changed! His cheeks, which had been flushed with the heat of the strife, were now deadly pale. He lay, or half reclined, on the edge of a hillock, and held

the miniature-likeness of a pretty young lady in his hand, which had been tied to his neck by a small gold chain. His eyes were fixed upon it, but they were fixed in death. I can not tell you what my feelings were. Indeed, I can not venture, it would unman me.'

ADDRESS

From the Peace Society of London to the People of the United States.

FRIENDS AND FELLOW-CHRISTIANS,—It is in no presuming or dictatorial spirit that we venture to address to you these few words of earnest sympathy and respectful expostulation, in reference to the perilous crisis in your national history through which you are now passing. But having been long laboring in our humble measure, in promoting peace on earth, upon the broad principles of our common Christianity, we cannot but feel how deeply that cause to which we are devoted, is implicated in the result of the experiment now being enacted in your country.

We do not feel ourselves either competent, or entitled, to offer any suggestion as to the best method of solving those internal difficulties which now agitate your great Commonwealth. But we venture confidently to state, that the worst of all solutions that can be attempted, is a fratricidal war, which must, however long and fiercely it may be waged, leave the merits of the questions in dispute wholly untouched, while it cannot fail to exasperate, into ten-fold malignity, the feelings of alienation which already exist. War, under any circumstances, and between any sections of the human race, is an evil which reason, religion and humanity cannot bewail too bitterly. But a civil war in a nation like your own, one of the very foremost among the nations of the earth in intelligence, civilization and Christian.enlightenment,—a war among men of the same race, language, and religion a war which would involve neighbors, friends, brothers members of the same Christian communions, children, it may be, of the same family, in mad and murderous conflict with each other, would be a spectacle at which all mankind would stand aghast in horror and dismay; a spectacle which, more than any event that has occurred for ages, would smite with discouragement, and all but despair, the friends of human progress throughout the world. For a long time past, thoughtful and philanthropic men, witnessing with sorrow the distracted and divided condition of the old world, and the ferocious and sanguinary wars to which these national antipathies have led, have fondly cherished the hope that the time might come when the several States of Europe might be so far federated together, as to be brought under the jurisdiction of a common tribunal, which should decide their differences without having recourse to the irrational arbitrament of the sword. In support of the practicability of such a measure, they have been hitherto wout to appeal triumphantly to the admirable example and illustration of such a system presented in your country. But the effect will be disheartening and disastrous to the last degree, if it be now found that you, Christian brethren, who had the immense ad

vantage of growing up side by side into free communities, exempt from those hereditary prejudices which have struck their roots so deep into the soil of Europe, can find no better means of adjusting your differences than by having recourse to the old expedient of barbarism and blood, of which even Europe is beginning to be ashamed, for its combined folly and brutality.

Permit us, also, respectfully to remind you that the evils of war,-as we know to our bitter cost in the old world, do not end with itself. On the contrary, it bequeaths to posterity a sinister legacy of hatreds, jealousies and rivalries, which poison the blood of nations for ages, and entail upon them burdens hardly less crushing than those of actual war. The enormous military establishments that are now sitting like an incubus on the heart of Europe, all but suffocating its life, are the penalties we have to pay for the conflicts into which our ancestors plunged, often in reference to questions which, all men now can see, might have been easily adjusted without a blow, if passion had not been permitted to usurp the place of reason. But the rankling recollections and mutual distrust which those quarrels engendered, are still the source whence arises the alleged necessity for the ruinous rivalry in armaments, which is hurrying us onward on a path that, if pursued much longer, can only lead to general bankruptcy. May Heaven in its mercy deliver America from a policy which would entangle it in the coils of such a system as this!

We implore you, then, Friends and Fellow-Christians, to avoid the fatal mistake of imagining that you can decide questions of disputed right by conflicts of brute force. We appeal to American patriots to save the land they love from the dishonor of appearing before the world in an attitude which can only excite the sorrow and pity of all good men. We appeal to American philanthropists to interpose their influence to ward off a catastrophe which will not only become a source of unutterable suffering and demoralization to their own country, but which will exercise a malign influence over the destinies of the whole human race. Above all, we appeal to Christian churches of all denominations, and emphatically to the ministers of the Prince of Peace, to stand between the living and the dead that the plague be stayed; by their example, by their persuasions, by their prayers, to arrest an evil which will not only paralyze their own efforts, and desolate God's inheritance by a flood of passion and crime, but which will be a scandal and a reproach to our common Christianity.

LONDON, APRIL 6, 1861.

JOSEPH PEASE, President.
HENRY RICHARD, Secretary.

The above address, so able and well-timed, we sent at once to all our newspapers, whose joint circulation reaches nearly all the readers in our land, with a special request for its speedy insertion.-ED.

REBELLION ACTUALLY BEGUN.

The slaveholders' rebellion, so long in virtual progress, has at length begun in form and earnest, by an attack upon Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor, April 12, and on the fifteenth President Lincoln issued his proclamation, declaring the rebellion, calling for 75,000 troops for its suppression, and convening Congress in special session, July 4th. Thus the great crime, premeditated for so many years, and for which its instigators have been making such desperate preparations for the last five or six months, is now in full blast, and threatening the land with evils which ages cannot repair.

We have no words to express our grief and humiliation. What a sin and shame for a people claiming to be in the very van of the world's progress, all professing in common a religion of peace, and solemnly bourd by the most sacred constitutional obligations to have every dispute among them decided only by legal, peaceful means, to rush, like so many madmen or tigers, to the work of mutual slaughter, for the adjustment of what must, after months or even years of fighting, be settled in the end by an appeal to reason alone. On this point we have already given our views to the public in season, and need not repeat them here. Had our views been wrought into the habits of our entire people, this terrible calamity could never have come. God grant that our friends may, in this hour of trial, be true to their principles, and exert what influence they can to avert or mitigate the atrocities and nameless evils of this unnatural strife. Let us, if possible, throw the oil of forbearance and love upon these maddened waves. Bear in mind that the parties, now in such fierce conflict, the North and the South, the friends of Freedom and the upholders of Slavery, must live side by side through all coming time. The Alleghanies will always stand just where they now do, and the Potomac and Susquehanna, the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi will continue to roll their waters in the same channels. The men on each bank must live together. Shall they do so in friendship or in hatred, in peace or in war?

We trust our friends will, first of all, bear ever in mind that Peace is always loyal. It is not possible for a peace man to be a rebel. We may dislike the government over us, and seek to change it, but never in the way of violent resistance to its authority. We cannot for a moment countenance or tolerate rebellion. All our principles and habits require us to sustain the government in every proper, legitimate effort for the enforcement of law, and the condign punishment of offenders. The cause of Peace was never meant to meet such a crisis as is now upon us. It belongs not to Peace, but to Government alone; and all that can be required of us, is that we prove ourselves loyal citizens. The issue belongs not to peace men, but to rulers, as a question of authority, right and power. Our Government put the issue on the proper ground, by calling for the power