LETTER XIII.

TO FIELD MARSHAL THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.

MILITARY AND MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE ILLUSTRATED, COMPARED, AND CONTRASTED, IN RELATION TO THEIR RESPECTIVE CHARACTERS, CLAIMS, AND GLORY.

MY LORD DUKE,-I beg leave to address your Grace upon two subjects which I conceive to be of the utmost importance to mankind. These subjects are War and Missions. With the latter there is reason to believe your Grace is not intimately acquainted, and I am, therefore, anxious to place before you some of its principles, and a few of the facts by which those principles are illustrated. I shall, at the same time, take the liberty of inquiring a little into a subject with which you are profoundly conversant, and of venturing to express a judgment on the respective merits of the soldier and the missionary. Every age has had its heroes, and those heroes have been its gods, to whom have been raised statues, columns, and temples, in addition to the more substantial rewards of wealth, rank, and privilege. There is reason to hope that this order of heroes is coming to an end; for certain it is, that the sword will

not devour for ever. The prime function of military heroes has been, to destroy men's lives; but the field now begins to be taken by a new order of heroes, whose special province it is to save them. No glory or utility, your Grace will allow, can attach to war but as it makes for peace. Now whether is the greater, he who extinguishes a conflagration, or he who prevents it? When wisdom shall govern our world, and mankind shall use their reason, military enterprise will be little thought of; and they who aspire to conduct it, they whose occupation is war, will be viewed with small favour. That day, I trust, is now dawning; and I would fain hope, that your Grace is England's last Great Warrior. "Soldiers of fortune" must soon lay aside their swords, and devote their faculties to the arts of peace. The missionary character, in all points the reverse of the military, is fast commanding the attention of mankind; and the sense of its claims is becoming hourly stronger. Hitherto the power of the sword has been paramount, its reign universal. Mortal strife has, for thousands of years, been the pride of princes, and the business of nations. The experiment is sufficient. The efficacy of the sword, as an instrument of civilization, has been fully tried; with what success, let the whole earth proclaim. It is now time for mankind to sit down and calculate the commercial and political, the moral and religious, value of military enterprise.

May I be permitted to point your Grace's attention backward for two or three thousand years, that I may exhibit before you the images, and remind you of the feats, of some of the principal destroyers of mankind? In attempting this, it is needless to go beyond Alexander, whose career commenced upwards of three hun

He is indisputably

dred years before the Christian era. the grand prototype of modern martial heroes. Alexander's father having trampled on the liberties of Greece, was meditating the subjugation of other nations, when he was cut off. The son at once proceeded to carry out his father's purpose; and the first step of his dreadful course gave mankind an earnest of his future operations. When the noble Thebans made an attempt to recover the freedom of which they had been cruelly robbed by Philip, Alexander, having taken the city by storm, levelled it with the ground, and sold thirty thousand of the virtuous and innocent inhabitants into slavery. The conqueror's progress was worthy of his commencement. He rushed forth like a dragon, to destroy mankind, and desolate the earth. We next behold him on the banks of the Granicus, fearfully polluting its pure streams with the blood of man. Anon we find him at Issus, mowing down a host of six hundred thousand men, who had come to oppose him in defence of their king and country. Soon afterwards we view him filling the famous city of Tyre with unutterable calamity, taking it by storm, and, to gratify his vengeance, crucifying two thousand of its defenceless inhabitants. See him again at Arbela, assailing Darius, the lawful and unoffending king, who, with six hundred and forty thousand men, came forth to repel the invader, and who left behind him three hundred thousand of them slaughtered by the hero! Such are the deeds he actually performed; but these were only the buddings of his military glory! Nothing could satisfy his thirst of power but the subjugation of the globe itself. He aspired to plant his blood-stained foot on the neck of all nations; and, when it was suggested that the number of

worlds was infinite, he burst into tears because he could not ascend to the stars, and carry his conquests throughout creation.

Such was Alexander, son of Philip, king of Macedon; and for these remorseless cruelties and dreadful crimes men have called him Great! Great he doubtless was, but it was in wickedness. He seems like an angel of death, who, by some error in the operations of nature, had become incarnate, and received a commission to desolate the fairest portion of the earth, and to butcher its innocent inhabitants! He finished as became him. He crowned his sanguinary career of audacious ambition by actually claiming for himself divine honours! I marvel not that his claim was conceded by a benighted world. For intellectual power, for impetuous passion, for impious ambition, and for destructive genius, he has had no equal. Thus far I grant that he was Great; but my inquiry is, was he good? Was the world the better for his existence? Did he promote the cause of human happiness? Did he advance one hair's breadth the progress of liberty and civilization? Ah! my Lord Duke, it had been well for the nations of the east, had he never been born! He deserved neither a tear, nor a tomb! He richly merited to be hissed off the stage of being, and driven into darkness by the curses of mankind! His name should have been blotted out of the vocabulary of their tongues, or, if retained, it ought never to have been pronounced but with execration and horror! In all respects he is diametrically opposed to the spirit, principles, and procedure of the Christian missionary. The one destroys, the other builds up, the social edifice. The one imparts felicity, the other inflicts calamity. The presence of the missionary excites songs of glad

ness;

the presence of the warrior extorts groans of grief. The latter is a scourge, the former a comforter, of mankind.

Cæsar, I need not remind your Grace, was a meet successor of Alexander, at a distance of some two centuries. He applied a master's hand in crushing the nations of the west. To fit him for the work of evil, not one additional quality of any kind was wanting. With a frame of iron, and intellectual powers approaching to perfection, a taste exquisitely refined, an eloquence unrivalled, or rivalled only by one,-with manners and habits the most polished and popular, reckless, prodigal, and splendid-with a courage that feared no danger, a perseverance that knew no weariness, and a sagacity which penetrated all things-with the impetuosity of a torrent, and the ambition of a Lucifera perfect pattern of all vices, a matchless example of all talents-he stood forth by far the most accomplished deceiver and destroyer of men that had ever appeared beneath the European sky. His career, from the storming of Mitylene, to his own assassination in the Senatehouse, was one series of sanguinary atrocities. His chief business, in his first province, was to pillage the inhabitants to pay the debts incurred by his profligacy. During the first division of his wars, he destroyed or took some eight hundred towns and cities,-subdued three hundred nations,-and butched more than a million of men! What shall be said of the second division, terminating, as it did, with the havoc of the plains of Munda? Who can estimate the amount of calamity which this conqueror brought upon mankind? Is not his conduct also inconceivably aggravated by the fact, that his wars were not defensive, but aggressive-wanton,