I did not conceal this weakness from my friend, and ventured to propose a plan on which I had previously been ruminating; though I had foreseen no means of putting it in practice. Every man had heard of the fortunes acquired in the east, and of the wealth which had been poured from the lap of India. The army there was at all times open to men like myself; youthful, healthy, and of education. 'Tis true I had been of opinion that there were strong moral objections to this profession: but these my more prevalent passions had lulled me into a forgetfulness of, and I stated this as the most probable scheme for the accomplishment of my dearest hopes. Mr. Evelyn, anxious not to wound me where I was most vulnerable, began by soothing my ruling passion; and then proceeded to detail the physical chances of a ruined constitution, of death, and of failure; and afterward to represent, with unassuming but with stedfast energy, the moral turpitude first of subjecting myself to the physical evils he had recited, and next of hiring myself to enmity against nations I had never known, and of becoming the assassin of people whom I had never seen, and who had not had any possible opportunity of doing me an injury, or even of giving me an offence. The objections I started, partly to defend the opinions I had begun with, and partly because I felt myself loth to relinquish a plan by which my imagination had been flattered, soon became very feeble: but the interesting nature of the subject prolonged the discussion till it was nearly dinner time. In the course of this enquiry, Mr. Evelyn delineated the contemptible yet ridiculous arts which are employed to entrap men into the military service; pourtrayed the inevitable depravity of their morals, and gave a history of the feelings worthy of fiends which are engendered, while they are trained to fix their bayonets, load their pieces, level them, discharge them at men they had never seen before, strike off the heads of these strangers with furious dexterity, stab the ground in full gallop on which they are supposed to have fallen and to lie helpless, and commit habitual and innumerable murders in imagination, that they may be hardened for actual slaughter. He afterward gave an enlightened and animated sketch of the abject condition of those who command these men, of the total resignation which each makes of his understanding to that of the next in rank above him, and of the arrogant, the ignorant, the turbulent, the dangerous and the slavish spirit which this begets. He finished the picture with a recapitulation of the innumerable and horrid miseries which everlastingly mark the progress of war; which he painted with such force and truth that I recoiled from the contemplation of it with abhorrence.