other men’s throats? That peace has done it all! If they oughtn’t to set up a dove with an olive branch at every railway terminus, I’m an impostor and no true cabman! Yes, grandmother, peace has done it all! Only think of the iron that had been melted into cannon, and round-shot and chain-shot, and all other sorts of shot, that the devils on a holiday play at bowls with!--if the war had gone on--all the very same iron that’s now peaceably laid upon sleepers! Think of the iron that had been fired into the sea, and banged through quiet people’s houses, and sent smashing squares and squares of men--God’s likenesses in red, blue, and green coats, hired to be killed at so many pence a day,--only think what would have been this wicked, I will say it, this blasphemous waste of metal--that, as it is, has been made into steam-engines! Very fine, indeed, they say, is the roar of artillery; but what is it to the roar of steam? I never see an engine, with red-hot coals and its clouds of steam and smoke, that it doesn’t seem to me like a tremendous dragon that has been tamed by man to carry all the blessings of civilisation to his fellow-creatures. I’ve read about knights going through the skies on fiery monsters--but what are they to the engineers, at two pound five a week? What is any squire among ’em all to the humblest stoker? And then I’ve read about martial trumpets, why, they haven’t, to my ears, half the silver in their sound as the railway whistle! Well, I should like the ghost of Bonaparte to get up some morning, and take the _Times_ in his thin hands. If he wouldn’t turn yellower than ever he was at St Helena! There he’d see plans for railways in France--_belly France_, as I believe they call it--to be carried out by Frenchmen and Englishmen. Yes; he wouldn’t see ’em mixing bayonets, trying to poke ’em in one another’s bowels, that a few tons of blood might, as they call it, water his laurels (how any man can wear laurels at all, I can’t tell, they must smell so of the slaughter-house!)--he wouldn’t see ’em charging one another on the battle-field, but quietly ranged cheek by jowl, in the list of directors! Not exchanging bullets, but clubbing together their hard cash. Consider it, grandmother, isn’t it droll! Here, in these very lists, you see English captains and colonels in company with French viscounts and barons, and I don’t know what, planning to lay iron down in France--to civilise and add to the prosperity of Frenchmen! The very captains and colonels who--but for the peace--would be blowing French ships out of water, knocking down French houses, and all the while swearing it, and believing it, too, that Frenchmen were only sent into this world to be killed by Englishmen, just as boys think frogs were spawned only to be pelted at! Ah, only give her time, and Peace--timid dove as she is--will coo down to the trumpet.