But, as the case stands, the new
principle of resistance nationally to bad habits, has arisen almost
concurrently with the new powers of national intercourse; and
henceforward by a change equally sudden and unlooked for, that new
machinery, which would else most surely have multiplied the ruins of
intoxication, has become the strongest agency for hastening its
extirpation.
ON WAR.
Few people need to be told--that associations exist up and down
Christendom, having the ambitious object of abolishing war. Some go so
far as to believe that this evil of war, so ubiquitous, so ancient and
apparently so inalienable from man's position upon earth, is already
doomed; that not the private associations only, but the prevailing
voice of races the most highly civilized, may be looked on as tending
to confederation against it; that sentence of extermination has
virtually gone forth, and that all which remains is gradually to
execute that sentence. Conscientiously I find myself unable to join in
these views. The project seems to me the most romantic of all romances
in the course of publication. Consequently, when asked to become a
member in any such association, I have always thought it most
respectful, because most sincere, to decline.
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