Take all the institutions of Learning and Beneficence, the crown jewels of the Commonwealth, schools, colleges, hospitals, asylums, and the sums by which they have been purchased and preserved are trivial and beggarly, compared with the treasures squandered within the borders of Massachusetts in vain Preparations for War,--upon the Navy Yard at Charlestown, with its stores on hand, costing $4,741,000,--the fortifications in the harbors of Massachusetts, where untold sums are already sunk, and it is now proposed to sink $3,875,000 more,[84]--and the Arsenal at Springfield, containing, in 1842, 175,118 muskets, valued at $2,099,998,[85] and maintained by an annual appropriation of $200,000, whose highest value will ever be, in the judgment of all lovers of truth, that it inspired a poem which in influence will be mightier than a battle, and will endure when arsenals and fortifications have crumbled to earth. Some of the verses of this Psalm of Peace may relieve the detail of statistics, while they happily blend with my argument. "Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts: "The warrior's name would be a name abhorred, And every nation that should lift again Its hand against a brother on its forehead Would wear forevermore the curse of Cain."[86] [84] Report of Secretary of War, Senate Document No. 2, Twenty-Seventh Congress, Second Session,--where we are asked to invest in a general system of land defences $51,677,929. [85] Executive Document No. 3, Twenty-Seventh Congress, Third Session. [86] Longfellow, The Arsenal at Springfield.