ces--supposed
answers to these questions--New arguments, from this supposed
conversation, against war._

I have now stated the principal arguments, by which the Quakers are
induced to believe it to be a doctrine of Christianity, that men should
abstain from war, and I intended to close the subject in the last
section. But when I consider the frequency of modern wars; when I
consider that they are scarcely over, before others rise up in their
place; when I consider again, that they come like the common diseases,
which belong to our infirm nature, and that they are considered by men
nearly in a similar light, I should feel myself criminal, if I were not
to avail myself of the privilege of an author, to add a few observations
of my own upon this subject.

Living as we do in an almost inaccessible island, and having therefore
more than ordinary means of security to our property and our persons
from hostile invasion, we do not seem to be sufficiently grateful to the
Divine Being for the blessings we enjoy. We do not seem to make a right
use of our benefits by contemplating the situation, and by feeling a
tender anxiety for the happiness of others. We seem to make no proper
estimates of the miseries of war. The latter we feel principally in
abridgments of a pecuniary nature. But if we were to feel them in the
conflagration of our towns and villages, or in personal wounds, or in
the personal sufferings of fugitive misery and want, we should be apt to
put a greater value than we do, upon the blessings of peace. And we
should be apt to consider the connexion between war and misery, and
between war and moral evil, in a light so much stronger than we do at
present, that we might even suppose the precepts of Jesus Christ to be
deficient, unless they were made to extend to wars, as well as to
private injuries.

I wonder what a superior being, living in the nearest planet to our
earth, and seeing us of the size of ants, would say, if he were enabled
to get any insight into the nature of modern wars.

It must certainly strike him, if he were to see a number of such
diminutive persons chasing one another in bodies over different parts of
the hills and vallies of the earth, and following each other in little
nut-shells, as it were upon the ocean, as a very extraordinary sight,
and as mysterious, and hard to be explained. He might, at first,
consider them as occupied in a game of play, or as emigrating for more
food, or for a bett