generous in the idea, something which shadows forth a grander soul in man; and if the world has not realized the splendid dream, it has yet been greatly benefited by the publication of these crude but beautiful idealogies.

WAR IN THE WORLD.

|ONTAIGNE, writing, as he very frequently did,

M

about himself, drawing his experiences chiefly from his own heart, and telling people exactly what he thought at the moment, naturally does

not let the passing events of the day go by without observation. Thus he tells us how his brother, being second to a gentleman in a duel, and having despatched his man, ran in to part the principals; and thus also he lets us know, incidentally, many curious particulars of the wars of the Guises, and the raids of the free companions in Guienne; and if our great master turn aside for that, we may surely gossip about war itself, and glance at the little and contemptible war—if war can ever be contemptible—which is disturbing Europe, and the very large and unsatisfactory war which is tearing America in pieces. All our tea-table philosophers and softly benevolent thinkers-they who take their "sentiments" from the words of wisdom which surround Maunder's Treasury—are ready to prove by line and rule that war is not a necessity; that it is cruel, rapacious, and

utterly unfit for philosophers, much less Christians, to indulge in; and yet the horrid fact remains-we must and do have war.

This is very unpleasant, especially to those who believe in an immediate millennium; but it is more unpleasant when we concede that the more quiet and dispassionate a thinker is, the less biassed, and the more determined to look upon the question on all sides, the deeper will be his conviction that, if matters proceed as they are now proceeding, we shall soon have a general European war. Whenever it commences it will be a sanguinary and a disastrous one. There is Waterloo to be avenged by one people, Solferino and Magenta to be wiped out by another, and a little credit account of Sebastopol to be looked into. Probably we shall find in this result a solution of Mr. Cumming's "Great Tribulation Coming on the Earth;" but we need not go to Daniel and the Revelation to foretell tribulations: they are of that sort which write their advent pretty plainly in political events, in arming and fort-building, in the preparation of fleets, and in the invention of all kinds of model instruments of destruction, all of which are to be noted now, and which are not very comfortable things for a philosopher to contemplate. These, indeed, are the true signs of the times, and those who read them need not be inspired.

We all know that Lord Chesterfield foretold very accurately the French Revolution, simply by looking around at the gaunt and angry faces, and the starvation and tyranny, which were to be seen any day and every day all over France before

1793. So now, when we read French newspapers, and listen to French talking and gossiping, and see, moreover, a fleet grow day by day, and an army of 600,000 men maintained without any actual necessity for it, we may well look up and expect the coming storm. And yet there is nothing more certain than that all of us hate war. It is a hungry, abominable, detestable, wicked thing. It is plainly murder on a large scale, and nothing else.

"War is a game which, were the people wise, kings should not play at." A very deep and wise sentence that, though written by a madman. But people are not wise. We dream of the era of peace, but dream only. We bid the joyous Christmas bells to "ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace;" but we are just as quarrelsome and vindictive and full of fight as our neighbours; and a very good thing it is that we are so, as we shall presently see. We paint pictures of Peace and War: the one smiling, sunny, and sweet; the other bloody, horrent, full of dying men and horses, of shouting and noise, of crackling flames and clouds of smoke and dust. We chronicle the horrors of war; the tears of the orphan and the widow; the lone age of the mother and father; the maimed and defaced image of God, which begs through the streets in a bowl, or drags its broken trunk to die in a ditch. There are not twenty-four more horrible pictures etched than those of Jacques Callot in his Miseries of War: they were true two hundred years ago; they are true now. Of the other abominations we speak not in our heart of hearts we all hate them, and sigh

for the fulfilment of old Merlin's prophecy, and the advent of King Arthur, who, dying, said—

"I come again

With all good things, and war shall be no more."

But we know now that this good time has not yet come. We are nearly as far from it as we ever were: there is, at all events, no immediate sign of the millennium. The Exhibition of 1851 gave an immense prominence to the arts of peace. It was, as it deserved to be, wonderfully successful. Aggression, fighting, sieges, battles, and batterings seemed to be forgotten. The aristocracy of labour drove the other aristocracy quite out of the field. Fighting was reckoned absurd, and people who saw the grand results of peace were to be knit together in one holy bond of universal brotherhood, and were to beat their swords into pruning-hooks, and to make knives and forks of their spears. But yet in 1852 there were several hundreds shot down in the streets of Paris-France was at war with herself; and in 1854-5 France, England, and Turkey were at war with Russia, in spite of the remonstrances of those three members of the Peace Society who travelled all the way to St. Petersburg to ask the Emperor Nicholas what he meant by it.

Then came the reports of the first battle. The very papers which had been preaching "peace" sent out word-painters of great force to describe a field of battle: the scattered brains, the lopped limbs, the strange contortions of the dying; the surgeons with their bare arms dipped to the elbows in blood;