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philanthropist as visiting "all Europe to dive into the depths of dungeons; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain; to take the gauge and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt; to remember the forgotten; to attend to the neglected; to visit the forsaken; to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries. His plan is original, and it is as full of genius as it is of humanity. It is a voyage of discovery, a circumnavigation of charity; and already the benefit of his labour is felt more or less in every country."

My Lord, this eulogium is merited; and although the rhetorician has made the most of his subject, I would not detract from the fame of Howard. Compared with the herd of common philanthropists, he was great, superlatively great; but there the "collation" must stop. He may not for a moment be placed in the scales with the Christian missionary, and still less with the apostles of Christ. What were his performances as compared with those of Paul? Nothing and vanity; objects utterly beneath mention. Whether we consider the nature, number, variety, extent or perpetuity of the benefits conferred by the labours of Paul on Asia, Europe, and the universe, they are all equally, and all infinitely, beyond comparison; and yet we look in vain into the volumes of moralists, philosophers, orators, and legislators, for one word in commendation of him! Why is this, my Lord? Viewing Paul simply as a philanthropist, as a teacher, a promoter of popular education of the highest order, because of a moral character, and as having transmitted these blessings through all subsequent generations, is he not, next to his Master, by far the first of human kind? What work so noble

as the work of the Christian teacher engaged in purifying and elevating the spirit of man? That work has outlived empires; it is still in all the freshness of opening manhood; it will survive the heavens above, and the earth on which we dwell. The terms in which your lordship describes the secular schoolmaster are inadequate to set forth the merits of Christian teachers of the men who teach for eternity. "Their calling is high and holy; their fame is the property of nations; their renown will fill the earth in after ages, in proportion as it sounds not far off in their own times. Each one of these great teachers of the world, possessing his soul in peace, performs his appointed course, awaits in patience the fulfilment of the promises, resting from his labours, bequeaths his memory to the generation whom his works have blessed, and sleeps under the humble, but not inglorious epitaph, commemorating one in whom mankind lost a friend, and no man got rid of an enemy!" Of this passage both the thought and the phrase are high and noble, but they are utterly inadequate to describe the claims and glory of the missionaries of the Son of God. Such a subject would elevate, while it would overtask, the language of angels!

My Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth has endowed you with an extraordinary perception of the .glory of civilization and the blessings of peace. I say perception; for in you it seems to be intuitive rather than the result of judgment and inquiry, while by these it has been powerfully fortified and invigorated. From the outset of your mighty career, this formed one of the most distinguishing features of your intellectual character. It is interesting to trace your love of peace and the arts of peace, your detestation of war and the

desolations of war, in your "Colonial Policy of the European Powers," the wondrous production of your 24th year, published in 1803; in your speech at Liverpool, in 1812, in which you declared yourself a man who would "give his own age no reason to fear him, or posterity to curse him,-one whose proudest ambition it is to be deemed the friend of liberty and peace;" and in your oration, in the same town, in July, 1835, when, after beholding the stupendous exhibition of mechanic skill which its locomotive works presented, your vast reflections on the scene thus found a correspondent vent:-"When I saw the difficulties of space and time, as it were, overcome-when I beheld a kind of miracle exhibited before my astonished eyes-when I surveyed mosses pierced through on which it was before hardly possible for man or beast to plant the sole of the foot, and now covered with a road and bearing heavy wagons, laden not only with innumerable passengers, but with merchandise of the largest bulk and heaviest weight,when I saw valleys made practicable by the bridges, of ample height and length, which spanned them,-saw the steam railway traversing the surface of the water at a distance of sixty or seventy feet in perpendicular height, -saw the rocks excavated, and the gigantic power of man penetrating through miles of the solid. mass, and gaining a great, a lasting, an almost perennial conquest over the powers of nature, by his skill and his industry,-when I contemplated all this, was it possible for me to avoid the reflections which crowded into my mind,-not in praise of man's great deeds,-not in admiration of the genius and perseverance which he had displayed, or even of the courage which he had shown in setting himself against the obstacles that matter had

opposed to his course,-no, but the melancholy reflection, that, whilst all these prodigious efforts of the human race, so fruitful of praise, but so much more fruitful in lasting blessings to mankind, and which never could have forced a tear from any eye, but for that unhappy casualty which deprived me of a friend, and you of a representative, a cause of mourning which there began and there ended; when I reflected that this peaceful, and guiltless, and useful triumph over the elements and over nature herself, had cost a million only of money, whilst fifteen hundred millions had been squandered on cruelty and crime-in naturalizing barbarism over the world—shrouding the nations in darkness-making bloodshed tinge the earth of every country under the sun-in one horrid and comprehensive word, squandered on WAR,-the greatest curse of the human race, and the greatest crime, because it involves every other crime within its execrable name, and all with the wretched, and, thank God, I may now say, the utterly frustrated-as it always was the utterly vain-attempt to crush the liberties of the people!-(Here the company rose simultaneously, and greeted this sentiment with deafening cheers.)-I look backwards with shame-with regret unspeakable-with indignation to which I should in vain attempt to give utterance-upon that course of policy which we are now happily too well informed and too well intentioned ever to allow again whilst we live— when I think that if one hundred, and but one hundred, of those fifteen hundred millions, had been employed in promoting the arts of peace, and the progress of civilization, and of wealth and prosperity, amongst us,.

* Mr. Huskisson's death in 1830, on the opening of the Railway.

instead of that other employment which is too hateful to think of, and almost now-a-days too disgusting to speak of (and I hope to live to see the day when such things will be incredible,-when looking back we shall find it impossible to believe they ever happened)— instead of being burdened with eight hundred millions of debt, borrowed after spending seven hundred millions-borrowed when we had no more to spend,—we should have seen the whole country covered with such works as now unite Manchester and Liverpool, and should have enjoyed peace uninterrupted during the last forty years, with all the blessings which an industrious and virtuous people deserve, and which peace profusely sheds upon their lot."

My Lord, it was worth being born into our world to give conception and utterance to this passage. Had it been the production of a Greek or Roman orator, it would have sufficed, singly and unsupported, to immortalize him. In vain, my Lord, shall we look into the stores of the heathen literature of any age for such a passage. Upon the subjects of which it treats-the greatest of all sublunary themes-it far surpasses any thing transmitted to our times. If your lordship will pause a moment, and cast your thoughts backward over the line of the Greek poets, you will find that, with the exception of Hesiod their father, and one or two passages in Homer, there is not in them all a single emphatic condemnation of the principle of war! Turning to the poetry of the Romans, we discover in the Pollio of Virgil a succession of beautiful lines which imply condemnation, and among some of the satirists, we meet with occasional expressions of aversion. But the truth is, as your Lordship early remarked in your "Colonial

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