he
present course of education in the schools, academies, and colleges of
the land. This perhaps would be the best way. It would accomplish the
object of preparing a sufficient number of young men to enter the State
schools of officers, and would beside tend to diffuse throughout the
body of the educated class of the people something of military knowledge
and of the spirit of the military virtues--to the great advantage of the
nation in any times, but especially in critical emergencies demanding
great and heroic sacrifices.

So horrible a thing is war, and so dreadful are its inevitable miseries,
that there is at first thought something shocking to many persons, in
the idea of making military instruction a part of the system of public
education--in cultivating the military spirit, and training the children
and youth of a nation to science and skill in the arts of carnage. The
kind and gentle-hearted find little consolation in being reminded that
war is one of God's agencies. They acknowledge that the earthquake, the
pestilence, the tornado, are His agencies. They find no difficulty in
saying, with WORDSWORTH, in regard to these:

'We bow our hearts before Thee, and we laud
And magnify Thy Name, Almighty God!'

Yet when he adds:

'But Thy most dreaded instrument
In working out a pure intent,
Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter--
Yea, Carnage is Thy daughter.'

they shrink from the thought and the image. It is too dreadful for ready
acquiescence.

But there is another side to the subject, and a deeper view. See how the
hero preacher, the saintly-hearted ROBERTSON--as pure and tender a
spirit as ever breathed--puts the matter:

'Take away honor and imagination and poetry from war, and it
becomes carnage. Doubtless. And take away public spirit and
invisible principles from resistance to a tax, and Hampden becomes
a noisy demagogue. * * * * Carnage is terrible. Death, and human
features obliterated beneath the hoof of the war horse, and reeking
hospitals, and ruined commerce, and violated homes, and broken
hearts--they are all awful. But there is something worse than
death. Cowardice is worse. And the decay of enthusiasm and
manliness is worse. And it is worse than death--aye, worse than a
hundred thousand deaths--when a people has gravitated down into the
creed that the wealth of nations consists not in generous hearts,
in national virt