Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's;" by Justinian in the precept "to live honestly, to hurt no man, and to render to every one his due;" and by Fichte, who declares that the conception of rights involves that, when men are to live in a community, each must so restrict his freedom as to permit the co-existence of the freedom of all others.

The violation of these precepts raises at once the right of selfdefence. This defence, even when it becomes aggressive, as it necessarily must oftentimes, is war. The moral bulwarks which have hitherto restrained one nation from violating these rules, no longer protect; religious sanctions are broken; the compacts and compromises devised by statesmen are disregarded; direct divine mediation was always rare and has wholly ceased, for Providence works now only by the action of the great laws of development; war becomes the test of survival, and the decision is made by a conflict of forces.

In social controversies upon subjects which laws do not govern, the pressure f customs and manners settles the contest; in litigations, the force of communities makes valid, through sheriff's and the posse, the decisions of the courts; in the internal development. of a nation, the violated safeguards are restored by triumphant revolutions which convert armies to the popular cause, and depose, and behead kings and counselors; between nations, war is the arbiter. This aggressive determination of controversies is not limited in its jurisdiction to resentment and defense against flagrant attacks. The very existence of one nation or of a party in a State may be, and often is, the equivalent of actual attack. There may be an invasion by peaceful means, which justifies warlike reprisal. The commercial policy of one country may be as ruinous to the welfare of a neighbor as a regularly organized piracy. Some ancient empire may send from its famine-stricken cities to another State, hordes of its outcasts, alien in stock and faith, and so hostile in the very particles of their blood that there can never be any absorption by marriage and the production of a mixed

race.

On the other hand, a race may have risen to the highest point of civilization and moral development; its members may have become so numerous as to make a deficit in subsistence. Migratior. becomes a necessity for self-preservation. A new continent is discovered or explored. It is inhabited by barbarians, by can

nibals, whose religions are atrocities, who have no laws, who have stood still from their beginning, who, if they should exist forever, would forever be the same, upon whom the laws of development have either never acted or have spent their force. Who will deny the necessity and justice of the migration of a people whose progress attests as conclusivly as by divine scripture, that they are a chosen race? Yet this migration involves wars, and the extirpation of the ancient stock.

We turn the stone leaves of the strata upon which the history of the earth has been written. We see incomplete plants disappear age after age, until the oak and the rose grow upon the latest page. The monsters of palæozooic times, whose bulk displaced the ancient seas or trampled down the primeval ferns, disclose their history from their stone graves. All these have disappeared through conflicts, and man, who reads the immense volume, stands dominant upon the fields of the world, as their successor. With the cessation of Roman conquest, Christianity ceases to expand. From Arabia to Hindostan all the seats of the ancient civilizations are profaned by dark idolatries of the most complex and bloody character. A man arises who has a genius for religion, and perhaps an inspiration, his name Mahomet. He proclaims the unity of God. He produces a book which in its civil aspect is a wise code of laws. Persecution takes the sword and is met by the sword. The Crescent spans the eastern world. It touches Granada with one point, and Delhi with the other, and upon all the nations beneath sheds a milder light than they ever felt before. Learning reigns from seats upon which the exquisite forces of Grecian literature or the commanding power of Roman conquest never placed her. The circumference of the earth is calculated upon African deserts; surgery is taught in Syrian universities; chemistry violates the sanctities of organized matter in Saracenic laboratories, and over all the enchanting song of poetry is heard instead of barbaric battle cries and the shrieks of slaughtered people.

In the changes of time, the colonial system of a great and liberty-loving empire fai.s by becoming unjust. Three millions of people can no longer be governed by appointed governors nor by royal charters. Interests and rights have arisen which require protection to those who are entitled to them. Representation in Parliament is denied. Force is applied, and soon takes its highest

form of war. All the incidental horrors of such struggles follow. But one hundred years—a mere day in such epochs-pass away, and with what results? The ancient forms of the New World have vanished; its idolatries are seen no more; the old tyranny is buried in history like the mammoth in the pages of stone. A great republic presides over a continent like a tutelary god, and looks down with protecting care upon the rivers which traverse it like veins, upon its vast lakes, upon its mountain ranges, richer in gold and silver than all the "barbaric East," upon its fields of cotton, white as snow, of wheat yellow as gold; upon its sailors, defying the hoary deep; upon its schools, where that knowledge is taught which enforces virtue; upon its sheltering places, so ample and hospitable for all who seek refuge from other lands, upon its fifty millions of freemen, its ways of peace and its powers for war, and all the grandeurs of a people who know their rights and fear God.

Of what is all this the result? Not of any concessions of peace, but of a righteous war which enabled an oppressed people to emancipate itself, and then, having formed alliance with all the forces which make States great-with the printing press, the school, religious freedom, the examples of antiquity, and all the constructive processes of all time, to produce the most consummate product of man in his political capacity.

The effect of great wars has been to render petty wars impossible. The history of remote antiquity is uniformly that of predatory or revengeful contests between small states, until some nation which most fully possesses the elements of progress has, by conquest, effected a consolidated empire. From that time, wars become fragmentary and affairs of the frontier. Long periods. of peace intervene. Leisure, the great need of an aspiring man or nation, is thus afforded, and during those periods of repose the choice intellects of the time build for the future. Some one writes a book which floats centuries, perhaps, upon the ocean of time, like a buoy, but to which in its season is moored all the precious freightage of a people. Another man subdues some refractory physical agency-invents the telescope and gives an impetus to astronomical science, mensurates the world's surface by new rules, and makes certain the way upon the deep; confines steam in an iron prison to work like a slave, and thus creates the power which cancels space; causes electricity

to speak from marvelous distances, and eliminates the friction of time in great and distant transactions. Great empires thus become possible through peaceful means. Men can act in masses instantly in their democratic capacity upon public affairs, though separated from each other by thousands of miles, and thus the republic, which was anciently of small area, as it was necessarily to enable the citizens to come together and take action, is now continental in expanse. Wars become less and less frequent, and in the long cycles of peace, humanity, undistracted by battles, raises itself higher and higher. Great national ideas and conceptions become dominant after hundreds of years of contest. A few great governments exist together instead of many small states in fear of the great one. The ambition of universal empire is no longer tenable even in theory. Great systems, too great to be often attacked by the others, exist in competitive examination for the student of political philosophy who, from the best of each, gathers the peculiar excellencies for universal naturalization. The Prussian school establishes itself throughout the civilized world. The manhood suffrage of America is claimed as a political right in Europe. The free tenure of land becomes the contention of oppressed tenants. The iron hand of the feudal lord loses its strength, and the statesman, like Prospero, enters upon his heritage.

Of course, little of all this is the immediate result of war. In the affairs of this world, the most efficient causes are remote in their operation; they are often the resulting average of alternate disaster and success; and sometimes they are so subtle and apparently casual that it is difficult to demonstrate their efficiency. Francis Bacon long ago observed that "the providence of God is such that He doth ever hang the greatest weights upon the smallest wires." But it is surprising how often the patient analysis of some structural function of the industry of a nation attaches it to war as its cause. The beet root sugar production of France, for instance, resulted from the isolation of that country during the Napoleonic wars by English blockades. The general frugality and hoarding propensity of that people, its impregnable power of self-sustainment, its rooted hold upon the land, its aversion to migrate, are in great degree the products of wars in which France was generally besieged by land and blockaded by sea. The commercial character and ascendancy of Englaud and the cosmopolitan migration of its people have resulted from its naval superiority,

and it is the only nation which has ever conquered an immense dominion as a collateral and incidental acquisition of its com

And what a conquest it has been! The great peninsula of Hindostan has become the mere appanage of the little island, which has girded its great dependency with the railroad track and the telegraphic wire, which has given to those hundred millions of people a code compounded of the choicest elements of the civil and the common laws, and disturbed the repose of Brahma by trial by jury and by the prætorian correction of English equity. No return of some celestial Ishmael of the stars, some comet from its journey of a thousand years to the outposts of our universe,

"Where gravitation, shifting, turns the other way,"

is more sublime than this revisitation by one of the great families of humanity to its ancient home. By war it went; by war it returned. At a time so remote that nothing but the imperishable identity of language is left to prove the fact, one of the primitive races sent out its army from its Asiatic home. It reached Greece. It drew from the nature of that enchanting land a fairer and more humane religion. It produced Homer, the poet; Thucydides, the historian; Pericles, the statesman; Plato, the philosopher. Still moving westward in the unrecorded ages it occupied Italy, and emerges into view at Rome. It takes up Christianity in its course of conquest, and, moving always westward, reaches the Atlantic. upon the coasts of Europe. The dark ages and the middle ages supervene, but the stock survives, still moving from its place of origin. Oceans are crossed, new continents are discovered, America is colonized; the race moves on along the path of war, until at last the world has been girdled and the descendants of the primeval people visit their ancestral places with all the accumulated results of thousands of years of conquest. They have acquired, planted, and transmitted freedom, religion, civilization, as the trophies of necessary wars, and, of all these, armies have been the true propaganda. No one has seen clearer than Victor Cousin the constructive functions of war, and he says:

"The hazards of war and of the diverse fortune of combats are spoken of without cessation. For my own part, I think there is very little chance in war: the dice are loaded, it seems, for I defy any one to cite me a single game ost by humanity. In reality, there is not a single battle which has taken a turn detrimental to civilization. Civilization may receive some check,-arms are inconstant,—but in the end the advantage, the gain, and the honor of the campaign remain to it. Every time that the spirit of the past and the spirit of