Was it possible for me to avoid the reflections which crowded into my mind, ... when I reflected that this peaceful and guiltless and useful triumph over the elements and over Nature herself had cost a million only of money, whilst fifteen hundred millions had been squandered on cruelty and crime, in naturalizing barbarism over the world, shrouding the nations in darkness, making bloodshed tinge the earth of every country under the sun,--in one horrid and comprehensive word, squandered on WAR, the greatest curse of the human race, and the greatest crime, because it involves every other crime within its execrable name?... I look backwards with shame, with regret unspeakable, with indignation to which I should in vain attempt to give utterance, ... when I think, that, if one hundred, and but one hundred, of those fifteen hundred minions, had been employed in promoting the arts of peace and the progress of civilization and of wealth and prosperity amongst us, instead of that other employment which is too hateful to think of, and almost nowadays too disgusting to speak of (and I hope to live to see the day when such things will be incredible, when, looking back, we shall find it impossible to believe they ever happened), instead of being burdened with eight hundred millions of debt, borrowed after spending seven hundred millions, borrowed when we had no more to spend, we should have seen the whole country covered with such works as now unite Manchester and Liverpool, and should have enjoyed peace uninterrupted during the last forty years, with all the blessings which an industrious and a virtuous people deserve, and which peace profusely sheds upon their lot.--IBID., _Speech at Liverpool, July 20, 1835_. Who can read these, and such passages as these [from Plato], without wishing that some who call themselves Christians, some Christian Principalities and Powers, had taken a lesson from the Heathen sage, and, if their nature forbade them to abstain from massacres and injustice, at least had not committed the scandalous impiety, as he calls it, of singing in places of Christian worship, and for the accomplishment of their enormous crimes, _Te Deums_, which in Plato's Republic would have been punished as blasphemy? Who, indeed, can refrain from lamenting another pernicious kind of sacrilege, an anthropomorphism, yet more frequent,--that of making Christian temples resound with prayers for victory over our enemies, and thanksgiving for their defeat? Assuredly such a ritual as this is not taken from the New Testament.--IBID., _Discourse of Natural Theology_, Note VIII. War is on its last legs; and a universal peace is as sure as is the prevalence of civilization over barbarism, of liberal governments over feudal forms. The question for us is only, _How soon?_--EMERSON, _War: Æsthetic Papers_, ed. E.P. Peabody, p. 42.