work of government, so woven into the web and woof of society, linked with such a multitude of personal interests, fostered by so many prejudices of education, and upheld everywhere by such a vast amount of money, talent and official influence, that it might well seem to defy all efforts for its removal or serious abatement. There is, in truth, no sure hope except in the promise of God; but with the angelic announcement at Bethlehem of Peace on Earth as the birth-song of our religion, and the oft-repeated prophecy, that under its full legitimate influence, the nations shall one day beat their swords into ploughshares, and learn war no more, we assured ly have the most ample encouragement in our work, and every reason to believe it will, in God's good time, reach a success as signal and glorious as the world has ever witnessed.

For such a consummation, however, we must both wait and work in the calm, cheerful patience of Christian Reformers. We cannot expect it in full to-day or to-morrow, this year or the next, in our day, or even in that of our children. In this cause we labor chiefly for generations yet unborn, and are scattering seed whose fruit will be gathered long after we shall have gone to our final account. We have indeed witnessed already results sufficient to reward us a thousand times over, but only a fraction of what is needed and is yet to come. Had we seen far less fruit in our own day, we should still have rested in full assurance, that a harvest, rich and glorious, will at length come in God's promised time. That time we can well afford to wait, and shall not wait in vain. We are scattering his own seed, and may safely leave the result in his hands. We are planting a tree whose leaves shall be for the healing of all nations from the evils of war; and, however many ages may elapse before it reach complete maturity, it will in the end shed over the whole earth the fulness of its benign influences. It is ours to use the means divinely appointed for this end, and then trust the promise of God to crown them in due time with success Whether successful or not now, we have no right, as believers in his word, to doubt for a moment the perfect triumph that is sure to come in the end.

The events of the past year, especially the rise and results of the late Italian War, teach many a pregnant lesson on this subject, but none that ought to diminish either our faith or our zeal. They should rather strengthen and stimulate both, and constrain us to gird ourselves anew for this great work. We see how strong a hold the war-system has on all Christendom; what a fearful capacity of mischief it keeps continually in its iron grasp; how easily it can, at almost any moment, pour its avalanche of evils over a continent, if not over a world; to how large an extent the great interests of mankind are held every hour at its mercy; how little control the nominal Christianity of Christendom has over this terrible evil, before which the Pope himself seems powerless to restrain his own followers from mutual butchery; and how vain the hope that the gospel itself, as hitherto understood and applied, can ever put an end to this giant sin and scourge. It is truly a vast work, only just begun; but it would seem as if the

events of the past year must, if anything ever can, stimulate the friends of God and man to a large increase of effort in its prosecution.

In this great reform, before it can be fully accomplished, the mass of Christians must be enlisted as a work properly and pre-eminently their own. No single organization can achieve it; and the chief mission of the Peace Society is to keep the object duly before the public, to show what needs to be done, and stimulate the friends of God and man to do it. We never dreamed that a handful of men associated in this reform could themselves use a thousandth part of the means requisite for its full and final success. Such an idea would have been a glaring absurdity. It must be the joint labor of millions; and our Society can at best do little more than wake the Christian community to their duty on the subject, and supply some helps and motives to its proper performance. They must themselves do it by enlisting in it those permanent, all-pervading influences which mould or sway society. It clearly cannot be done at once. Such a chronic evil as war, so nearly coeval with human depravity itself, so deeply rooted, and so widely diffused, can never, by any amount of means, be cured in a day or an age. Its entire, permanent cure may prove the work of all future time, a reform to end only with the world itself.

The reason is obvious. All society, Christian as well as pagan, has been, from time immemorial, educated 'wrong on this subject, and needs to have in this respect its general habits of thought and feeling recast in the pacific mould of the gospel. Men have been trained to war; they mus henceforth be trained to peace. We must reverse in this regard the whole current of past ages. We must give all society a new education on this subject; and for such a purpose we must set at work everywhere the agencies or influences that form a controlling public opinion on every such question. The fireside and the pulpit, our schools and our presses, we must enlist as the chief nurseries of character, and the mainsprings of all moral, social and political influences. We must secure especially those higher seminaries where are trained the virtual law-givers of public opinion, the men that mould or sway society and government our legislators and teachers, our editors, authors, and men in the learned professions. Win these, and in time we shall gain all. It is on such permanent, all-pervading influences we must put our trust, under God, for the steady progress and ultimate triumph of this cause.

Here we have the cheapest and most effective system of means possible for our purpose; and our chief responsibility and labor as a Peace Society is to keep all these duly at work everywhere in this great reform. Our first co-worker is the Christian mother in the nursery, by the cradle of her little one; and around her cluster the gentle yet potent influences of the hearth and family altar. Next come teachers in infant, primary and Sabbath schools, where we find in embryo the elements of all society and all governments. Make these what they might and should be, and the ultimate result we seek would follow in time as a matter of course.

The whole system of popular education must, also, become a nursery of

Peace. It can, with ease and certainty, be made so; and we are glad to see it lending its aid more and more to this great Christian reform. Juster views on this subject are coming to prevail in the general education of the young; works less tinctured with the war-spirit, are now issued for their instruction or amusement; and we find in this respect a marked and very auspicious improvement in most of the text-books prepared for our seminaries of learning. True, the progress is slow, yet sure and very hopeful. We cannot expect society to throw off at once the exuviæ of its old war-habits, and form in their place those required by the gospel in its purity and strictness.

We feel, moreover, a special anxiety to enlist in this cause the permanent influence of our higher seminaries. We cannot forego their aid. The future leaders of society, gathered in these nurseries of knowledge and character at the very seed-time of life, must, if possible, be won to right views on this subject; and hence we have formed the plan of establishing in all our colleges and professional seminaries, premiums for essays on some important topics connected with the cause of Peace. In every one of these institutions, several hundred in all, we propose, and have to some extent, arrangements already in progress for the purpose, to offer a prize of some twenty or thirty dollars often cnough to keep the subject in this way before every generation of students. The process may be slow; but it is pretty sure in time to gain our object.

Still more ought the Pulpit to become everywhere an ally and champion of this cause as a part of its mission. The ministers of Christ ought all to be leaders in such a reform. We should expect this, as a matter of course; and, if they were, how easily, and in how many ways, could they advance it. Touching the great mainsprings of moral power in every community, they might, if they would, prevent at once all actual war in Christendom, and put an end at length to her whole war-system. It could not live long under their united frowns; and in no slight degree are they as a body responsible for the continuance of its enormous evils. Often and earnestly have we reminded them of this high responsibility, urged them to exert their utmost power in behalf of a cause so peculiarly their own, and furnished them with our helps in pleading its claims. Our Periodical, as its organ, we send gratuitously to every one that preaches regularly on the subject once a year, and gives his people an opportunity of contributing to the object. We have brought the subject before the ecclesiastical bodies of nearly every denomination in the land, and repeatedly procured from them resolves' commending the cause as eminently entitled to the cordial co-operation and support of all Christians.' We cannot doubt the sincerity of such resolves; and though we have so much reason to deplore the strange, inexcusable apathy of most Christian ministers, there are, in the aggregate, not a few impressed with its great importance, and inclined to press its. claims upon their people. To this service we would fain urge them all; and, if true to their trust as ambassadors of the Prince of Peace, how much could the 40,000 preachers of his gospel in our own land do for its perpetu

al peace! That gospel, rightly applied, would put an end to all war; and such an application they are bound everywhere to make. Let them all do their whole duty on the subject; and the custom would ere long cease from the land.

There is another engine of still more ubiquitous power to be permanently enlisted in this cause -the Periodical Press. Of newspapers alone there are said to be in our country more than 4,000, not a few of them dailies, with an aggregate of more than 400 million sheets a year. What an array of moral power! and all this we hope yet to see at work everywhere for the great cause we plead. It cannot be at once, or very soon;

but it may and will be in time. With this view we induce as many as possible of our friends to write on the subject for the periodical press; and we furnish all our religious newspapers, and the most widely circulated of our secular ones, with our own periodical, and some of our other publications, as helps in bringing the subject before their readers. How many minds we may thus reach, or how much light we diffuse, it is of course impossible to say; but it is certainly an easy and very hopeful way of sifting the subject into the community, keeps attention awake more or less to its importance, and can hardly fail to work in time a general, decisive change for the better. In no other way could we do so much with so small an outlay. It is drop by drop that wears away the rock; and by such silent, ubiquitous influences on the public mind we may hope in time to create a popular sentiment that shall at length make war, like snow beneath a vernal sun, melt away from every land blessed with the light of the gospel.

Such are some of the incidental agencies or influences we are setting at work in this cause; but, besides all these, we ourselves directly employ the press and the pulpit much more than could have been expected from the slender means at our command. With funds that would seldom have met one half the current expenses of an ordinary church in New York or Boston, we have from the start sustained a regular and generally increasing scale of operations. For more than forty successive years we have issued, as the organ of our cause, a periodical devoted exclusively to its advocacy, with a circulation at times of more than ten thousand copies, and now sent to all our higher seminaries of learning, and to all the leading periodicals, religious and secular, in our country. We have stereotyped nearly a hundred tracts, and published a number of volumes, part of them quite large, that have in some cases been scattered by thousands and tens of thousands throughout the land. For nearly twenty-five years we have had in our service a Secretary whose whole time and energies have been devoted to the cause, and have also kept in our employ from two to five or six lecturing agents in different parts of the country. All this, indeed is a mere fraction of what needs to be done; but it is certainly more than could have been expected in a cause so strangely neglected, and compelled from its start to force its way through almost every conceivable obstruction and discouragement.

However full the past year may have been of events and alarms seemingly ill-boding to our cause, we think, after all, that its general prospects have seldom been more hopeful than they are at this moment. We have had most appalling glimpses of what war is beneath the meridian blaze of the nineteenth century in the very heart of Christendom; and this startling experience of its evils, with the general frown of the world upon its suicidal folly, and the fact that public opinion virtually compelled its abrupt termination after two or three months, is clearly reacting in favor of a policy that shall supersede the sword by rational, peaceful methods of adjusting national disputes. Already are light, order and hope emerging out of the recent chaos; and from the events of the past year there is likely to arise a surer and more permanent peace among the nations of Europe. Men seldom learn much practical wisdom except from bitter experience; and the terrible lessons crowded into a single month upon such battle-fields as Magenta and Solferino, cannot, in an age like ours, be entirely lost upon either people or rulers. They can hardly help seeing, as the two Emperors practically confessed in their treaty so hastily concocted at Villafranca to prevent the further effusion of blood, that all such sacrifices of life and treasure are a wanton, suicidal waste, leaving every point in dispute to be settled after all by other means than mutual slaughter - either by agreement between themselves, or by reference to umpires. A lesson, so patent to common sense, ought surely to have been learned at much less expense; but, if it could not be, it may have been worth, at the rate usually paid by nations for such bitter experience, all the more than five hundred millions of money, and the one or two hundred thousand lives, sacrificed in working out that fearful problem of mischief, folly and crime.

The year has teemed with events of unusual interest on the question of Peace the close of England's struggles with her subjects in India; the rise of new difficulties, so foolishly raised between her and China, boding another war; the friendly adjustment of our long-pending controversy with Paraguay; the prompt arrest of our incipient troubles with England in Oregon; the suspension, for the time, of fillibustering by our citizens against Cuba, Mexico and the feeble States in South America; the silly, quixotic raid of Spain into Morocco; the annexation of Central Italy to Sardinia by a simple vote of the people, the herald of changes that may peacefully revolutionize in time all Europe in the interest of freedom and popular rights; one of the most hopeful political omens of the year, if not of the age. Such are some of the leading events of the year, but to which we can make only these passing allusions.

The course and scale of our Society's operations have been the past very much as in preceding years. From the legacy of William Ladd, though awarded to us by the court more than a year ago, we have as yet received nothing; and when the expenses of management and litigation are all deducted, the sum total secured in the end to our cause, is likely to be much less than its friends have been led to expect. What still remains is now