But not so the generous enmity of Sir William Wallace. His commission was, not to destroy, but to save; and though he carried his victorious army to feed on the Southron plains, and sent the harvests of England to restore the wasted fields of Scotland, yet he did no more. No fire blasted his path; no innocent blood cried against him from the ground! When the impetuous zeal of his soldiers, flushed with victory, and in the heat of vengeance, would have laid several hamlets in ashes, he seized the brand from the destroying party, and throwing it into an adjoining brook: "Show yourselves worthy the advantages you have gained," cried he, "by the moderation with which you use them. Consider yourselves as the soldiers of the all powerful God, who alone has conducted you to victory; for, with a few, has he not enabled us to subdue a host? Behave as becomes your high destiny; and debase not yourselves by imitating the hirelings of ambition, who receive, as the wages of their valor, the base privilege to ravage and to murder. "I wish you to distinguish between a spirit of reprisal, in what I do, and that of retaliation, which actuates your present violence. What our enemies had robbed us of, as far as they can restore, I take again. Their bread shall feed our famishing country; their wool clothe its nakedness. But blood for blood, unless the murderer could be made to bleed, is a doctrine abhorrent to God and to humanity. What justice is there in destroying the habitations and lives of a set of harmless people, because the like cruelty has been committed by a lawless army of their countrymen, upon our unoffending brethren? Your hearts may make the answer. But if they are hardened against the pleadings of humanity, let prudence show your interest in leaving those men alive, and with their means unimpaired, who will produce other harvests, if need be, to fill our scantier granaries. "Thus I reason with you, and I hope many are convinced; but they who are insensible to argument must fear authority, and I declare that every man who inflicts injury on the houses, or on the persons of the quietest peasantry of this land, shall be punished as a traitor to the state." According to the different dispositions of men, this reasoning prevailed. And from the end of September (the time when Wallace first entered Northumberland), to the month of November, when (having scoured the counties of England, even to the gates of York) he returned to Scotland, not an offense was committed which could occasion his merciful spirit regret. It was on All Saints Day when he again approached the Esk; and so great was his spoil that his return seemed more like some vast caravan moving the merchandise of half the world, than the march of an army which had so lately passed that river, a famishing, though valourous host.