advice? We think not; and yet better counsel could not be given nor followed. Every one has heard the statement of a learned judge, that it is better, far better, for a poor client to forego his rights than to enter on a Chancery suit. Laws were made for rich men, not for the poor; so war, the ultimate appeal of kings, seems to be fit only for rich nations. “The last louis d'or," said one great monarch, “wins the game." "Victory is, after all, upon the side of the biggest battalions," said another conqueror. Certainly many large nations have been made smaller by war; it is very seldom that we find small nations made larger.

The cost of military preparations is, we learn from a peace authority, in Austria, thirty-three per cent. of the whole expenditure of government, exclusive of the interest of the debt. In Prussia it is forty-four per cent.; in France, sixty-eight per cent. (twenty years ago it was only thirty-eight per cent.); in Great Britain, seventy-four per cent. ; and in America (United States), eighty per cent. ; the difference in the per-centage of the latter arising from the very cheap way in which the executive is there carried on, not on account of the greater war preparations of the States. Now no one can but wish that all this expense were saved, and that we, for one nation, only expended twenty pounds sterling where we now pay one hundred. Nay, as we pay considerably more for the interest of the debt incurred through fighting than we do for the whole of the executive, there is positively a difficulty in calculating the advantages which would have arisen had we always secured to ourselves the blessings of unbroken peace.

But every ledger has a debtor and creditor account. Everything has its two sides of the argument; and every evil has its distinct compensation. Manners grow ripe and rotten in a continued peace; corruptions are rife, tyranny increases, the insolence of the rich and the misery of the poor are equally enlarged. But war binds a nation together, teaches it the value of its poorer people, brings out promptitude, despatch, fortitude, bravery, and many virtues. It shows it also that there are many other qualities to be admired besides success in trade. It brings people upon their knees before God. Its reverses are more keenly felt, its punishments more vividly recognised, than perhaps any other. Nor are its lessons soon forgotten. The French remember them yet. It is a pity that they still do so. "Ah," writes one of their authors, "we are far from Waterloo now! We have more than half a million of armed men; we have an enormous fleet of ships; we are wealthy, and not reduced to our last franc and last soldier, as we were then." And the moral he preaches is, of course, revenge. This is very terrible. We feel that we have on the opposite shore a neighbour full of courage, vigour, and thirsting for revenge and glory; a word understood by him in only one way. We find that he is eager to be the first nation in Europe, to have his deeds constantly talked about; "the most brilliant and the most dangerous of the nations in Europe, adoring chance, force, success, splendour, more than true glory, and best fitted to become by turns an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, of terror, but never of indifference."

We bow to this decision of one of that brilliant nation : we cannot be indifferent. We cannot rest in tranquillity when other nations re-arrange the boundaries of Europe. Were we only to oppose gentleness to our aggressive neighbours, we know from an old fable what the result would be. The proposition of one enthusiastic Quaker, that we should let an army of fifty thousand men land and march on to London, and welcome, but not oppose them, and so shame them out of their outrage, will not hold water. We sigh, therefore, but buckle on our armour.

Man is a splendid animal, and, following his animal propensities, cannot get on without war; nor will he do so when all the kingdoms of all ages, and all the armies that ever were mustered, all that Cæsar led or Nero oppressed, all that Xerxes assembled, the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies enrolled, the Consuls, Alaric, Attila, Mahomet, Genghis Khan, the Crusaders, and the Kings of the East and West and their generals, from Narses and Belisarius to Turenne, Marlborough, Napoleon, and Wellington, enlisted and led to battle-till all these rise again from those graves into which ambition or oppression hath hurried them, till then man will still, with periodic madness, indulge in war.

THE BARBARITIES OF WAR.

M

ANY months have now elapsed since the Federals, with a determination and persistency we can but admire, commenced the siege of Charleston-a

siege henceforward to be celebrated for the amazing obstinacy and bravery of the defenders—and that the Federal general experimented with a new engine, Greek fire. The purport of this "Greek fire" is to set in flames houses, hospitals, churches, and the city generally, and to act upon the combatants by injuring the non-combatants (by the way, we did not hear that Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, or any of the peace party, sent word to their friends in America that they had better not employ such barbarous means of fighting); and in pure self-defence the Confederates have been fain to go to their own inventors for the same or a like combustible. Here is something which, ten years ago, we should have read with horror :-" On

near the

Bay Road, Captain Travis made two distinct experiments of his fire or composition, using on each occasion less than half a pint of the preparation-a fluid. Both were eminently successful. Instantaneously, on being exposed

to the air, the fluid becomes a blaze of fire, with heat intense, resembling that of a liquid metal in the smelting process. A pile of green wood, into which it was thrown, ignited immediately, like tinder. Without delay, within ten seconds, a number of buckets full of water were thrown upon the flames, a dense volume of smoke ascended, the hissing and singing sound of a quenched fire was heard ; but lo! the burning fluid licked up the water, destroying its oxygen; the fluid seemingly added to the flame, and the wood cracked and hummed, and the flames arose again defiantly unquenchable. On the occasion of these experiments 'Travis's Greek fire' burned for something over a quarter of an hour in full vigour and force. Its heat is intense, and flies at once into the body of the substance it touches."

From another quarter of the globe we read, about the same time, that a British admiral, with an exceedingly Dutch name, had demanded from the Japanese compensation for the murder of Mr. Richardson, an English subject. Now this demand was fair enough, and so far so clear. The Japanese paid the compensation, but on their refusing to complete the transaction by a punishment of the murderers, the admiral, as a guarantee, seized three steamers. Upon this, the Japanese, being previously prepared, fired upon the British ships, killed two excellent officers and several men, and knocked our war vessels about very seriously. Of course Jack Tar replied, silenced the forts, and in the course of events, although it is evident that there was no direct attempt to do so, he set fire to the town. Thereon Mr. Cobden wrote a most bitter letter,