Congratulations poured in; my father bore them with his usual equanimity; and standing on the hearth, his hand in his waistcoat, he said, musingly, "Among the last delusions of Human Error I have had to notice Rousseau's phantasy of Perpetual Peace, and all the like pastoral dreams, which preceded the bloodiest wars that have convulsed the earth for more than a thousand years!" "And to judge by the newspapers," said I, "the same delusions are renewed again. Benevolent theorists go about prophesying peace as a positive certainty, deduced from that sibyl-book the ledger; and we are never again to buy cannons, provided only we can exchange cotton for corn." Mr. Squills (who, having almost wholly retired from general business, has, from want of something better to do, attended sundry "Demonstrations in the North," since which he has talked much about the march of improvement, the spirit of the age, and "Us of the nineteenth century ").--"I heartily hope that those benevolent theorists are true prophets. I have found, in the course of my professional practice, that men go out of the world quite fast enough, without hacking them into pieces or blowing them up into the air. War is a great evil." Blanche (passing by Squills, and glancing towards Roland).--"Hush!" Roland remains silent. Mr. Caxton.--"War is a great evil; but evil is admitted by Providence into the agency of creation, physical and moral. The existence of evil has puzzled wiser heads than ours, Squills. But, no doubt, there is One above who has his reasons for it. The combative bump seems as common to the human skull as the philoprogenitive,--if it is in our organization, be sure it is not there without cause. Neither is it just to man, nor wisely submissive to the Disposer of all events, to suppose that war is wholly and wantonly produced by human crimes and follies,--that it conduces only to ill, and does not as often arise from the necessities interwoven in the framework of society, and speed the great ends of the human race, conformably with the designs of the Omniscient. Not one great war has ever desolated the earth, but has left behind it seeds that have ripened into blessings incalculable!" Mr. Squills (with the groan of a dissentient at a "Demonstration").--"Oh! oh! oh!" Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or rather douche, of erudition that fell splash on his head as he pulled the string with that impertinent Oh! oh! Down first came the Persian war, with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they had drunk up in their march through the East; all the arts, all the letters, all the sciences, all the notions of liberty that we inherit from Greece,--my father rushed on with them all, sousing Squills with his proofs that without the Persian war Greece would never have risen to be the teacher of the world. Before the gasping victim could take breath, down came Hun, Goth, and Vandal on Italy and Squills.