and vice versa, which he has performed, will of itself give a sufficient command of words. Lord Brougham has said that it was his custom to translate aloud from Demosthenes daily, and the likeness which his speeches bear to those of that orator, shews what advantage he thus gained.

The want of orators in England may be justly a source of regret, but, in at least one point of view, it is a fault on the right side, and we should be very loath to exchange our English σιγῆς ἀκίνδυνον γέρας for French garrulity or American effrontery.

MODERN WAR.

WE propose in the few following pages to examine some of

the sentiments which have of late been popular with respect to the social benefits which war is supposed to confer: and the hope now often expressed of the effect which the tone of our popular action might receive from a conflict such as that in which we have been lately engaged. It is not easy, nor is it always practicable, to scrutinize narrowly the results of any one set of circumstances on the character of a people: it is hopeless to do so when the total effect is considerably overrated: but when it is intimated in quarters which command respect and secure attention, that a modern European war will awaken a nation from a lethargy of dishonest hypocrisy, and produce a healing impulse almost in private character; and this so much even that the consummation, in spite of its attendant horrors, is one devoutly to be wished; it is time honestly to enquire what foundation these expectations have: what will remain over and above in the way of social improvement, when such a war has ended: what we have left to us of durable reinvigoration when our friends are wounded in Russia, and our purses exhausted by the income-tax.

It was once the dream of the poet, and the prophet's most confident hope, that the days of war should cease. The prevailing passion for paradox would naturally lead us to expect that our bards of to-day will pray for the death of peace. There are many circumstances which remove from ourselves the horrors of war. The scene has not been laid in our land for many generations; we have forgotten the look of the ruined village and the desolated champaign; we can only guess at the real hue of mangled limbs and bleeding wounds. Nor is this all; the sober current of national life flows evenly in a clear-hewn channel; the wheels of the car of state follow quietly the beaten groove. We have leisure to mark the social blots, we descry easily the shallow thought and heartless life, we long for a grand passion, a stirring impulse which shall rouse us to know ourselves and one another better, and live more as men and fellow-citizens should. And such, we sometimes conceive, might be found in the excitement of war. And yet somehow our armies have fought and perished, and our coffers have been emptied, and all our state energies aroused for combat; and we find still that chicory is mixed

with coffee, and bank-directors rob their creditors, and but for the private sorrows, and a few great lessons we have learnt, it is as though the war had never been.

We are justified, then, in inquiring, whether these anticipations deserved to be realized; whether there was truly any foundation for the idea that society would be bettered and the tone of public feeling raised by the proclamation of a European war. If we find that these hopes were destitute of a good ground and substance, and that we must look for the greatest development of the better national feelings not in conflicts with other nations only, but also and rather in those purposes and energies which are consistent with the enjoyment of the profoundest peace and most friendly foreign relations, then we shall have reason to believe that civilization is a real working agency for good after all: and that the portion of the national frame which may be used to the greatest advantage is not, as poets fable, the muscles, but the mind.

Such a poem as Maud can plead no exemption from the laws of positive argument, so far as the poem itself is didactic in tenor. Nor is the madness of the hero a shield against the assaults which may fairly be made against it; since it only serves, as far as we can see, to soften and tone down the harsh propositions which would otherwise perhaps hardly have obtained the assent which has largely been granted to them. Now in this poem it is indicated that we are being consumed by the canker of peace. We have made it, we read, far from a blessing; society is rotten, trade dishonest, we are virtually at war with one another. Burglary and drunkenness are in particular some of the fruits of peace, and fatten on the pastoral hillock. Now if splendid language and a rhythm new and entrancing were sufficient to ensure what after all is simply true political economy, we of course should not venture to criticise those eloquent verses of the Laureate. But is the stigma on peace one rightly and fairly deserved? are these specified evils to be traced to these specified causes? We think not. Society is rotten? We doubt very much whether the Tory lord gave up his dinners when he heard of the entrance into the Black Sea. The news of Balaclava did not shorten our milliners' bills, or annihilate for ever morning calls. Trade dishonest? Yet Paul and Strahan may have speculated in the warloan, and Robson and Redpath did somehow swindle through it all. Fraud did not cease when we sent our armies out; and the analysis of the Lancet did more to purify our food than the message from Her Majesty to the Commons. the love of gold the parent of all cheating and malice? Yes. surely this is a mere phase of the general plague of com

Is

petition; and a myriad of Laureates would fail to convince us that a restriction on the necessaries of life has a tendency to remove this curse. Let us boldly state what we believe; the richer a nation is, so far the more prosperous it is, and the more happy its inhabitants; and if we have no reason to suppose that peace is a fruitful mother of crime, in the name of all social science, let us be peaceful, and prosperous, and rich. Our brute instincts teach us that to fight is part of our nature; and a necessary part too, as history shows; but if we read and believed some few of our popular works just now, we should run the risk of laying them down persuaded that the object of reason and christianity was not to regulate our brute instincts, but to stimulate them. Deny it if you will, each member who sat on committee the other morning upon church-rates was a better object of veneration than any of the vieilles moustaches or the older beaux sabreurs.

The

Are we then to deny that a just war, justly waged, has its uses? Let us separate the justice and the use, and acknowledge the benefit only in the large agencies for good which the sense of a right action will always have. The late war was commenced, carried on, and completed, for a single, clear, and righteous object;-the maintenance of the police of Europe, the sustaining in all its integrity of a system which we share for the common profit, the resistance to aggression, not because it directly injured us, but because we were conscious that the offence was an indirect injury to all, and that it attacked an individual part of the common body of European interest which it was our duty to defend. very fact of suffering for this object was a glory and benefit to all: but when once we pass this point, when once we lay the glory in the pride of repelling the usurper, when we once in the very slightest degree wage war for the sake of success, when Alma and Inkermann fill us with any sensations beyond pleasure at the certainty of our own strength, this feeling of a common interest either vanishes or becomes a curse, because it is selfish; and the common energy shews itself no longer a harmonizing principle, but an endeavour for common aggrandisement. Now has there been, on the other hand, in a kindred though different department of the public service, something lately of a higher glory gained? Have we had before us something which may perhaps hereafter be a still greater cause of rejoicing than all the triumphs of the war? Is there something which gives greater hopes of national prosperity and advancement than the unanimous vote of money to the Queen or the stubborn resistance of that November morning? Have we not that speech, spoken by an English re

MAY, 1858.

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presentative at the Congress of Paris, the substance of which the cramped minute boldly but eloquently shadows forth :

"The Earl of Clarendon, having demanded permission to "lay before the Congress a proposition which he thinks should 66 be favourably received, states that the calamities of war are "still too present to every mind not to make it desirable to "seek out every expedient calculated to prevent their return. "That a stipulation had been inserted in Art vii. of the Treaty "of Peace, recommending that in case of difference between "the Porte and one or more of the other signing Powers, แ recourse should be had to the mediation of a friendly state "before resorting to force. The First Plenipotentiary of Great "Britain conceives that this happy innovation might receive

a more general application, and thus become a barrier "against conflicts which frequently only break forth because "it is not always possible to enter into explanation and come "to an understanding. He proposes therefore to agree to

แ a resolution," &c.

Well spoken, representative of England! Is not this a positive gain? May we not presume that we have here the germ of a system which after years and years may lead us, in spite of all the Mauds that can be written, to cast our hopes, not on the coming of a Russian fleet against Portsmouth, but on the steady and unselfish working of honest diplomacy, and very possibly a multitude of those processes of civilization which more than one parliamentary orator would call hypocrisies and shams?

And yet there are those who grow weary of mere prosperity, who see the evil much more vividly than the good, who have no sympathy with that patient and profound analysis which has elicited the great principles of social and political well-being. Forgetting that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in the world's history it has involved a folly and a crime; forgetting that even with every favourable construction it contains a strange and mystifying anomaly when waged by a Christian nation; omitting the consideration of the physical suffering, and disregarding that of the moral contradiction, they call for some whirlwind of war to sweep away the noxious vapours which they see lazily gathering round the apathy of our prosperous peace.

It would be well sometimes to consider, when invoking the whirlwind, what the object and end of the whirlwind is. War for the sake of aggrandisement is now abandoned, in name at least, if not in practice. War for the sake of polemic proselytism, whether civil or religious, has been during the last halfcentury condemned. We do not now cast jealous eyes on Nor