He agitates in an impassioned way against the horrors of war. His picture "Food for Powder" begins this crusade. A cannon is lying idle on the wall of a fortress, and around this slumbering iron monster children are playing at soldiers, with no suspicion that their sport will soon be turned into bitter earnest, and that in war they will themselves become food for this demon. In another picture, "The civilisation of the Nineteenth Century," soldiers intoxicated with blood and victory have broken into a chamber by night and are stabbing a mother with her child. A third, "The Last Cannon Shot," hints dimly at the future pacification of the world. "A Scene in Hell," however, is the chief of the effusions directed against war. The Emperor Napoleon in his grey coat and his historical three-cornered hat is languishing in hell; wavering flames envelop him as with a flowing purple mantle, and an innumerable multitude of mothers and sisters, wives and betrothed maidens, children and fathers, from whom he has taken their dearest are pressing round him. Fists are clenched against him, and screams issue from toothless, raging mouths. He, on the other hand, with his arms crossed on his breast, and his haughty visage stern and gloomy, stands motionless, looking fixedly with satanic eyes upon the thousands whose happiness he has destroyed. [Illustration: WIERTZ. THE FIGHT ROUND THE BODY OF PATROCLUS.] In his "Thoughts and Visions of a Decapitated Head", Wiertz, moved by Victor Hugo's _Le dernier jour d'un condamné_, makes capital punishment a subject of more lengthy disquisition. The picture, which is made up of three parts, is supposed to represent the feelings of a man, who has been guillotined, during the first three minutes after execution. The border of the picture contains a complete dissertation: "The man who has suffered execution sees his body dried up and in corruption in a dark corner; and sees also, what it is only given to spirits of another world to perceive, the secrets of the transmutation of matter. He sees all the gases which have formed his body, and its sulphurous, earthy, and ammoniacal elements, detach themselves from its decaying flesh and serve for the structure of other living beings.... When that abominable instrument the guillotine is one day actually abolished, may God be praised," and so on.