1. WAR. This, howsoever necessary and inevitable it may often be, is always to be esteemed a great evil; if we advert, either to its origination or its effects; and nothing can justify its exertions, but the laws of self-preservation. The sin of man first gave it an existence; and the same bitter cause continues it to this day. “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even from your lusts?” James, iv. 1. Tyrannical passions predominating in the mind, give birth to those sanguinary schemes, which, when pursued, produce every species of confusion and death. If we examine carefully, from whence all those scenes of devastation have arisen, that have deluged the world with blood, we shall find, that, in general, they have sprung from unbounded ambition, avarice, pride, or resentment. And multitudes of tyrants, as well as factious confederates in usurpation and rebellion, have never been able, in thousands of cases, to assign any other reason for their enterprises in blood and slaughter, but this; that the one could not bear an equal, nor the other a superior; or those had too little, and these not enough. While, to foment the dreadful quarrel, the lust of revenge and rebellion operates like oil poured on the flame. Thus nations begin and carry on war, until they are tired of worrying and killing one another; and when the consequences of this horrid work are weighed in the balance of humanity and reason, many a conqueror may sit down and weep over his victories, when he reflects that they have been purchased at the expense of the blood of thousands of his fellow-creatures. And he who could contemplate such victories with pride or pleasure, unmixed with remorse and compassion for the sorrow, the ruin, the desolation they have caused, is a desperate character, that, one would hope, can meet with a parallel, only in “Macedonia’s madman and the Swede.”