It is true that the ingenuity of our inventors is far from being exhausted, and that in a few years more we may be able to destroy a regiment round a corner and bombard a fleet over the horizon; but I believe the effective result of these crowning scientific successes will only be to confirm the at present partial impression on the minds of military and naval officers, that their duty is rather to take care of their weapons than to use them. "England will expect" of her generals and admirals to maintain a dignified moral position as far as possible out of the enemy's sight: and in a perfectly scientific era of seamanship we shall see two adverse fleets affected by a constant law of mutual repulsion at distances of two or three hundred miles; while in either squadron, an occasional collision between the leading ships, or inexplicable foundering of the last improved ones, will make these prudential manœuvres on the whole as destructive of the force, and about ten times more costly to the pocket, of the nation, than the ancient, and, perhaps, more honorable tactics of poorly-armed pugnacity. There is, however, one point touched upon in P. S. C.'s letter, to me the most interesting of all, with respect to which the data for accurate comparison of our former and present systems are especially desirable, though it never seems to have occurred to your correspondent to collect them--the estimates, namely, of the relative destruction of civil property. Of wilful destruction, I most thankfully acknowledge the cessation in Christian warfare; and in the great change between the day of the sack of Magdeburg and that of the march into Paris, recognize a true sign of the approach of the reign of national peace. But of inevitable destruction--of loss inflicted on the peasant by the merely imperative requirements and operations of contending armies--it will materially hasten the advent of such peace, if we ascertain the increasing pressure during our nominally mollified and merciful war. The agricultural losses sustained by France in one year are estimated by your correspondent at one hundred and seventy millions of pounds. Let him add to this sum the agricultural loss necessitated in the same year throughout Germany, through the withdrawal of capital from productive industry, for the maintenance of her armies; and of labor from it by their composition; and, for third item, add the total cost of weapons, horses, and ammunition on both sides; and let him then inform us whether the cost, thus summed, of a year's actual war between two European States, is supposed by military authorities to be fairly representative of that which the settlement of political dispute between any two such Powers, with modern instruments of battle, will on an average, in future, involve. If so, I will only venture further to suggest that the nations minded thus to try their quarrel should at least raise the stakes for their match before they make