Living as we do in an almost inaccessible island, and having therefore more than ordinary means of security to our property and our persons from hostile invasion, we do not seem to be sufficiently grateful to the Divine Being for the blessings we enjoy.  We do not seem to make a right use of our benefits by contemplating the situation, and by feeling a tender anxiety for the happiness of others.  We seem to make no proper estimates of the miseries of war.  The latter we feel principally in abridgments of a pecuniary nature.  But if we were to feel them in the conflagration of our towns and villages, or in personal wounds, or in the personal sufferings of fugitive misery and want, we should be apt to put a greater value than we do, upon the blessings of peace.  And we should be apt to consider the connexion between war and misery, and between war and moral evil, in a light so much stronger than we do at present, that we might even suppose the precepts of Jesus Christ to be deficient, unless they were made to extend to wars, as well as to private injuries.

I wonder what a superior being, living in the nearest planet to our earth, and seeing us of the size of ants, would say, if he were enabled to get any insight into the nature of modern wars.

It must certainly strike him, if he were to see a number of such diminutive persons chasing one another in bodies over different parts of the hills and vallies of the earth, and following each other in little nut-shells, as it were upon the ocean, as a very extraordinary sight, and as mysterious, and hard to be explained.  He might, at first, consider them as occupied in a game of play, or as emigrating for more food, or for a better climate.  But when he saw them stop and fight, and destroy one another, and was assured that they were actually engaged in the solemn game of death, and this at such a distance from their own homes, he would wonder at the causes of these movements, and the reason of this destruction, and, not knowing that they possessed rational faculties, he would probably consider them as animals, destined by nature to live upon one another.

I think the first question he would ask would be, And from whence do these fightings come?  It would be replied of course, that they came from their lusts; that these beings, though diminutive in their appearance, were men; that they had pride, and ambition; that they had envy and jealousy; that they indulged also hatred, and malice, and avarice, and anger; and that, on account of some or other of these causes, they quarrelled and fought with one another.