ed by the more rugged one of stones and
clubs, and war assumed a sanguinary aspect. As man advanced in refinement,
as his faculties expanded, and as his sensibilities became more
exquisite, he grew rapidly more ingenious and experienced in the art of
murdering his fellow beings. He invented a thousand devices to defend and
to assault--the helmet, the cuirass, and the buckler, the sword, the dart,
and the javelin, prepared him to elude the wound as well as to launch the
blow. Still urging on, in the career of philanthropic invention, he
enlarges and heightens his powers of defense and injury. The aries, the
scorpio, the balista, and the catapulta, give a horror and sublimity to
war, and magnify its glory, by increasing its desolation. Still
insatiable, though armed with machinery that seemed to reach the limits of
destructive invention, and to yield a power of injury commensurate even
with the desires of revenge--still deeper researches must be made in the
diabolical arcana. With furious zeal he dives into the bowels of the
earth; he toils midst poisonous minerals, and deadly salts--the sublime
discovery of gunpowder blazes upon the world; and finally, the dreadful
art of fighting by proclamation seems to endow the demon of war with
ubiquity and omnipotence!

This, indeed, is grand!--this, indeed, marks the powers of mind, and
bespeaks that divine endowment of reason, which distinguishes us from the
animals, our inferiors. The unenlightened brutes content themselves with
the native force which Providence has assigned them. The angry bull butts
with his horns, as did his progenitors before him; the lion, the leopard,
and the tiger, seek only with their talons and their fangs to gratify
their sanguinary fury; and even the subtle serpent darts the same venom,
and uses the same wiles, as did his sire before the flood. Man alone,
blessed with the inventive mind, goes on from discovery to discovery,
enlarges and multiplies his powers of destruction; arrogates the
tremendous weapons of Deity itself, and tasks creation to assist him in
murdering his brother worm!

In proportion as the art of war has increased in improvement has the art
of preserving peace advanced in equal ratio; and as we have discovered, in
this age of wonders and inventions, that proclamation is the most
formidable engine of war, so have we discovered the no less ingenious mode
of maintaining peace by perpetual negotiations.

A treaty, or, to speak more cor