race into madness were it incurred for any other purpose.  But, while fighting, men have kept their eyes steadily fixed upon peace, which is to be the reward of their valor and their pecuniary sacrifices.  Every warlike time has been followed by a period in which strenuous exertions have been made to make peace perpetual.  Never was there a more profound desire felt for peace than that which prevailed among the Romans of the Augustan age, after a series of civil and foreign wars yet unparalleled in the history of human struggles.  One poet could denounce the first forger of the iron sword as being truly brutal and iron-hearted; and another could declare it to be the ‘mission’ of the Romans only to impose terms of peace upon barbarians, who should be compelled to accept quiet as a boon, or endure it as a burden.  Strange sentiments were these to proceed from the land of the legions, but they expressed the current Roman opinion, which preferred even dishonor to war.  So was it after the settlement of Europe in 1815.  A generation that had grown up in the course of the greatest of modern contests produced the most determined and persistent advocates of the ‘peace-at-any-price’ policy; and for forty years peace was preserved between the principal Christian nations, through the exertions of statesmen, kings, philanthropists, and economists, who, if they could agree in nothing else, were almost unanimous in the opinion that war was an expensive folly, and that the first duty of a government was to prevent its subjects from becoming military-mad.  Perhaps there never was a happier time in Christendom than it knew between the autumn of 1815 and the spring of 1854, after Napoleon had gone down and before Nicholas had set himself up to dictate law to the world.  It was the modern age of the Antonines, into which was crowded more true enjoyment than mankind had known for centuries; and they are beginning to learn its excellence from its loss,—­war raging now in the New World, while Europe lives in hourly expectation of its occurrence.  There were wars, and cruel wars, too, in those years, but they faintly affected Europe and the United States, and probably added something to men’s happiness, for the same reason that a storm to which we are not exposed increases our sense of comfort.  Their thunders were remote, and they furnished materials for the journals.  So we saw a Providence in them, and thanked Heaven, some of us, that we no longer furnished examples of the folly of contention.

The friends of peace were actuated by various motives.  With statesmen and politicians peace was preferred because it was cheaper than war, and all countries were burdened with debt.  England has sometimes been praised because she so uniformly threw her influence on the side of peace, after she had accomplished her purpose in the war against imperial France.  Time and again, she might have waged popular wars, and in which she would have probably been successful; but