fathers; the war of 1812 our fathers, and Creek and Cherokee expatriations, and Black Hawk, Patriot, Seminole, and Mormon skirmishes their sons. The martial spirit is always a tiger, and we have given the tiger too much room and freedom. In fact, the Temple of Peace has not remained long shut during our national existence. Though most of our wars have been small ones, that circumstance has not prevented their imbuing a large portion of our citizens with the ambition of arms. It is one of our maxims, that "in time of peace we should prepare for war." The whole population are armed; there is not, probably, a house in the country, unless it belong to a Quaker or a Non-resistant, without its sword, pistol, musket, or rifle. The expenses of our army and navy, even in time of peace, have always exceeded, by many millions, the maximum of the civil list. Hence there is always existing a large profession of men, whose seeming interest it is to have their country engaged in war; for then every expenditure in this direction is enormously increased; active service creates vacancies and accelerates promotions; and the prize money of war is better than the earnings of industry. But other causes, besides those above noted, have contributed to awaken in "Young America" the aspiration for military renown. General literature, whether in the form of poetry, oratory, or history, and whether imported or domestic, has always thrown the decisive preponderance of its influence into the war scale. Republicans have wished to show that they were equal to the performance of any feat that king or kaiser ever dared, or that minstrel ever sung. It has been openly avowed on the floor of Congress, by the most distinguished men of the country, that the time had arrived for us to do "some great thing," to let the Old World know that we were not the cowards or sluggards they might otherwise suppose us to be. As if it were not well known in every land, from north to south, that the United States was rising to be a leading power in the earth; as if two wars with the British monarchy, in which we certainly were not worsted, were not sufficient witnesses to our valor, without seeking a quarrel with a rent and distracted nation to show our republican manhood; as if the good opinion of the crumbling, bankrupt, starving, war-taxed, and groaning kingdoms of Europe were to be purchased at the fearful price of one drop of human blood unrighteously shed. In the recent tremendous agitations, that have swept like a resistless tide over that continent, the example of republican America has been loudly and cheeringly quoted; — would that we were more worthy of the title of the banner republic! - but what has been quoted for imitation, for inspiration, for justification, by the masses struggling for their inalienable rights, has not been our wars, our slaveries, our inconsistencies, but our equal rights, our bread enough and to spare, our wise institutions, our world-renowned enterprise and industry, and our unrivalled prosperity. - Again; the pride of race has swollen to still greater insolence the pride of country, always quite active enough for the due observance of the claims of universal brotherhood. The Anglo-Saxons have been apparently persuaded to think themselves the chosen people, the anointed race of the Lord, commissioned to drive out the heathen, and plant their religion and institutions in every Canaan they could subjugate. The idea of a "destiny," connected with this race, has gone far to justify, if not to sanctify, many an act on either side of the Atlantic; for which both England and the United States, if nations can be personified, ought to hang their heads in shame, and weep scalding tears of repentance. When they can produce any Mosaic commission from the Almighty King of kings, to diffuse the gospel of peace at the point of the bayonet, or the benign arts and sciences of a civilized age by the brute force of an earlier period, it will be quite time enough to consider their authority. Meanwhile, the inquiry presses powerfully, are these same destined Anglo-Saxon missionaries so immaculate in their character, so wise in their great national ideas, and so unbendingly true in their realization of them, that they have earned a title or authenticated "a divine right" to conquer and colonize the rest of God's earth? And when on one shore we have taken the guage of Ireland's woes and wrongs, and the oppressions of the factories, collieries, ships, and colonies of England; and, on the other shore, recalled the repudiation of State debts, the slavery of three millions of immortal beings, and the endless wrongs of the natives of the soil, which we so proudly tread, to enumerate no other crimes; we shall admit, with great reluctance, that either of the gigantic progenies of the Anglo-Saxon race has established by past wisdom, fidelity, or consistency, a presumptive title to be appointed guardian over the decrepid races of the Eastern or Western hemisphere. They may, doubtless, plead the right of might; but that is far from being the might of right. They may use the old appeal, ultima ratio regum, the ultimate resort of kings, and alas! we now see, of republics too; but so long as they have no more divine method than that, of civilizing the savage, and Christianizing the heathen, they are held down by an eternal gravitation to the vulgar level of "Macedonia's madman and the Swede." True, they possess arts and arms, but there are even more potent agents than these in the progress of humanity. Have we read the history of sixty centuries, and failed to learn even the alphabet of the sublime lessons she would teach, that truth, love, righteousness, great and heavenly principles only, can worthily and successfully preside over the processes of human improvement? It is still an unsettled question, whether the Crusades, the Norman conquest, or the wars of the old French Revolution, did more evil or good. But there is not the glimmer of a doubt that the mariner's compass, the art of printing, the steamboat, the railroad, and the telegraph, have been ministers of good to mankind. We must be dull scholars in the Christian lore, and the veriest laggards in the work of the present age, if we still cherish the old folly of ambition and vainglory that has demonized the nations of the dead. But not to dwell longer upon considerations that will come up again in another connection, none can be blind to the pride of race as one of the causes that has prompted the hostilities in Mexico. European emigration, too, has had its effect. Hundreds of thousands, with all their old-world ideas, unbaptized into the spirit of liberty, except it be as license, have been transplanted into the vast regions of the Middle States, the West and South-West. They have been accustomed to the bloody dramas of Europe, and they have supposed that the same must be acted over again in America. Far be it from us to take up any slanderous speech against our emigrant brethren, many of whom have shown themselves capable of understanding the rights and discharging the obligations of freemen, and have added much to the wealth, intelligence, and morality of their adopted country. But it is well known that no inconsiderable part of the American army has consisted of foreigners. They have been warmly commended as showing, by their readiness to enlist, and espouse our quarrels, their enthusiasm in the cause of liberty, and fidelity to their land of refuge. But the lover of peace will see, at the bottom of this fair-seeming, the dangerous element of military habits, acquired during the turbulent scenes of the last fifty years, transferred from the banks of the Rhine, the Elbe, and the Shannon, to those of the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Colorado. The roots of the old war-encumbered civilization, torn and broken, indeed, but possessing an unyielding tenacity of life,- are set out in the rich soil of the American prairies. Whether they live and bear their bitter fruits, or wither and die, is for the friends of peace, under God, to decide. The great valley of the West may become the hot-bed of war; and nothing but a wide and early dissemination of the pacific principles of the Gospel, by books, tracts, lectures, and conversation, can prevent our late foray into a sister republic from being the prolific seed of sorrows without end. Indeed, the slow advance in their full power, of the schoolhouse and the church, after the fugitives that have gone into the wilderness, has given time for a rank development of barbaric passions and habits. The tendencies to physical violence, somewhere or upon somebody, it mattered little where or upon whom, have had too little check. The true American ideas have been supplanted by a system of Bedouin morality in the minds of not a few, cast beyond the control of a high-toned public conscience. Powerful as the older and more civilized portions of the Union have been in their enterprize, zeal for freedom, and moral and religious character, wherever their sons have pitched the tents of their wanderings, yet the truth compels us to say, that in some portions of the East, the Centre, the feudal South, and South-West, and the rude West, the good principles of an earlier day have lost their savor, and the way has been opened for precisely such results as have been developed during the last four years, the Annexation of Texas, a sanguinary and embittered war, and the dismemberment of Mexico. The relations of cause and effect hold true in the moral as surely as in the material world. Nations reap what they sow. We have, in sober fact, been educating ourselves for a considerable time for just such issues as have lately been developed. Our treatment both of the red man and the black man, has habituated us to "feel our power, and forget right." Wars enough have been waged to keep |