he Disposer of all events, to suppose that war
is wholly and wantonly produced by human crimes and follies,--that it
conduces only to ill, and does not as often arise from the necessities
interwoven in the framework of society, and speed the great ends of
the human race, conformably with the designs of the Omniscient. Not one
great war has ever desolated the earth, but has left behind it seeds
that have ripened into blessings incalculable!"

Mr. Squills (with the groan of a dissentient at a
"Demonstration").--"Oh! oh! oh!"

Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or
rather douche, of erudition that fell splash on his head as he pulled
the string with that impertinent Oh! oh! Down first came the Persian
war, with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they had drunk up
in their march through the East; all the arts, all the letters, all the
sciences, all the notions of liberty that we inherit from Greece,--my
father rushed on with them all, sousing Squills with his proofs that
without the Persian war Greece would never have risen to be the teacher
of the world. Before the gasping victim could take breath, down came
Hun, Goth, and Vandal on Italy and Squills.

"What, sir!" cried my father, "don't you see that from those irruptions
on demoralized Rome came the regeneration of manhood, the re-baptism of
earth from the last soils of paganism, and the remote origin of whatever
of Christianity yet exists free from the idolatries with which Rome
contaminated the faith?"

Squills held up his hands and made a splutter. Down came Charlemagne,
paladins and all! There my father was grand! What a picture he made of
the broken, jarring, savage elements of barbaric society. And the iron
hand of the great Frank,--settling the nations and founding existent
Europe. Squills was now fast sinking into coma or stupefaction; but
catching at a straw as he heard the word "Crusades," he stuttered forth,
"Ah! there I defy you."

"Defy me there!" cries my father; and one would think the ocean was in
the shower-bath, it came down with such a rattle. My father scarcely
touched on the smaller points in excuse for the Crusades, though he
recited very volubly all the humaner arts introduced into Europe by that
invasion of the East, and showed how it had served civilization by the
vent it afforded for the rude energies of chivalry, by the element of
destruction to feudal tyranny that it introduced, by its use in the
emanci