immense importance! We call ourselves civilized, yet we are daily perpetrating the grossest outrages; we boast of our knowledge, yet we do not know how to live one with another half so peaceably as wolves; we term ourselves Christians, yet the plainest injunction of Christ, "to love our neighbour as ourselves," we have yet, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight years after his death, to adopt! But most monstrous of all has been the moral blindness or the savage recklessness of ourselves as Englishmen.
Secure from actual warfare, we have loved
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! for ages ignorant of all
Its ghastlier workings (famine or blue plague,
Battle, or siege, or flight through wintry snows,)
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! Abroad
Stuffed out with big preamble, holy names.
And adjurations of the God in heaven,
We send our mandates for the certain death
Of thousands and ten thousands! Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war.
The best amusement for our morning's meal!
The poor wretch who has learnt his only prayers
From curses, who knows scarce words enough
To ask a blessing from his heavenly Father,
Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute,
Technical in victories, and deceit,
And all our dainty terms for fratricide;
Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues
Like mere abstractions, empty sounds, to which
We join no feeling, and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound;
As if the fibres of this god-like frame
Were gored without a pang; as if the wretch
Who fell in battle, doing bloody deeds,
