these, by certain 'Natural Enemies' of the French, there are
successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied
men; Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she
has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even
trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another
hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all
dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two
thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till
wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty
similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner
wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come
into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with
a gun in his hand. Straightaway the word 'Fire!' is given; and they
blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful
craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and
anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil
is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest
strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously,
by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton!
their Governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another,
had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.--Alas, so is it
in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old,
'what devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!'--In that
fiction of the English Smollett, it is true, the final Cessation of War
is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two Natural Enemies,
in person, take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the
same, and smoke in one another's faces, till the weaker gives in:
but from such predicted Peace-Era, what blood-filled trenches, and
contentious centuries, may still divide us!"

Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his
own sorrows, over the many-colored world, and pertinently enough note
what is passing there. We may remark, indeed, that for the matter of
spiritual culture, if for nothing else, perhaps few periods of his
life were richer than this. Internally, there is the most momentous
instructive Course of Practical Philosophy, with Experiments, going
on; t