perpetual self-defence, the life of the nation can be aught else: or
that any appliances of scientific comforts, any intellectual
cultivation, even any of the most direct and common-sense arguments
of self-interest, can avail to quiet in man those outbursts of wrath,
ambition, cupidity, wounded pride, which have periodically convulsed,
and will convulse to the end, the human race. The philosopher in his
study may prove their absurdity, their suicidal folly, till, deluded
by the strange lull of a forty years' peace, he may look on wars as
in the same category with flagellantisms, witch-manias, and other
'popular delusions,' as insanities of the past, impossible
henceforth; and may prophesy, as really wise political economists
were doing in 1847, that mankind had grown too sensible to go to war
any more. And behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before
the thunderstorm; and one electric shock sets free forces
unsuspected, transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense;
forces which we can no more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from
incarnating themselves in actual blood, and misery, and horror, than
we can control the madman in his paroxysm by telling him that he is a
madman. And so the fair vision of the student is buried once more in
rack and hail and driving storm; and, like Daniel of old when
rejoicing over the coming restoration of his people, he sees beyond
the victory some darker struggle still, and lets his notes of triumph
die away into a wail,--'And the end thereof shall be with a flood;
and to the end of the war desolations are determined.'

It is as impossible as it would be unwise to conceal from ourselves
the fact that all the Continental nations look upon our present peace
as but transitory, momentary; and on the Crimean war as but the
prologue to a fearful drama--all the more fearful because none knows
its purpose, its plot, which character will be assumed by any given