Casting our eyes over the history of nations, with horror we discern the succession of murderous slaughters by which their progress is marked. Even as the hunter follows the wild beast to his lair by the drops of blood on the ground, so we follow Man, faint, weary, staggering with wounds, through the Black Forest of the Past, which he has reddened with his gore. Oh, let it not be in the future ages as in those we now contemplate! Let the grandeur of man be discerned, not in bloody victory or ravenous conquest, but in the blessings he has secured, in the good he has accomplished, in the triumphs of Justice and Beneficence, in the establishment of Perpetual Peace! As ocean washes every shore, and with all-embracing arms clasps every land, while on its heaving bosom it bears the products of various climes, so Peace surrounds, protects, and upholds all other blessings. Without it, commerce is vain, the ardor of industry is restrained, justice is arrested, happiness is blasted, virtue sickens and dies. Peace, too, has its own peculiar victories, in comparison with which Marathon and Bannockburn and Bunker Hill, fields sacred in the history of human freedom, lose their lustre. Our own Washington rises to a truly heavenly stature, not when we follow him through the ice of the Delaware to the capture of Trenton, not when we behold him victorious over Cornwallis at Yorktown, but when we regard him, in noble deference to Justice, refusing the kingly crown which a faithless soldiery proffered, and at a later day upholding the peaceful neutrality of the country, while he met unmoved the clamor of the people wickedly crying for War. What glory of battle in England's annals will not fade by the side of that great act of justice, when her Parliament, at a cost of one hundred million dollars, gave freedom to eight hundred thousand slaves? And when the day shall come (may these eyes be gladdened by its beams!) that shall witness an act of larger justice still,--the peaceful emancipation of three million fellow-men "guilty of a skin not colored as our own," now, in this land of jubilant freedom, bound in gloomy bondage,--then will there be a victory by the side of which that of Bunker Hill will be as the farthing candle held up to the sun. That victory will need no monument of stone. It will be written on the grateful hearts of countless multitudes that shall proclaim it to the latest generation. It will be one of the famed landmarks of civilization,--or, better still, a link in the golden chain by which Humanity connects itself with the throne of God. As man is higher than the beasts of the field, as the angels are higher than man, as Christ is higher than Mars, as he that ruleth his spirit is higher than he that taketh a city,--so are the victories of Peace higher than the victories of War. * * * * *