mankind from the ever-memorable victories of little Greece over the
rolling masses of servile Asia, which were nigh sweeping over Europe
like the high tides of a swollen sea, carrying its choking sand over all
the germs of civilization, liberty, and taste, and nearly all that is
good and noble. Think what we should have been had Europe become an
Asiatic province, and the Eastern principles of power and stagnation
should have become deeply infused into her population, so that no
process ever after could have thrown it out again! Has no advantage
resulted from the Hebrews declining any longer to be ground in the dust,
and ultimately annihilated, at least mentally so, by stifling servitude,
and the wars which followed their resolution? The Netherlands war of
independence has had a penetrating and decided effect upon modern
history, and, in the eye of all who value the most substantial parts and
elementary ideas of modern and civil liberty, a highly advantageous one,
both directly and through Great Britain. Wars have frequently been, in
the hands of Providence, the means of disseminating civilization, if
carried on by a civilized people--as in the case of Alexander, whose
wars had a most decided effect upon the intercourse of men and extension
of civilization--or of rousing and reuniting people who had fallen into
lethargy, if attacked by less civilized and numerous hordes. Frequently
we find in history that the ruder and victorious tribe is made to
recover as it were civilization, already on the wane with a refined
nation. Paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, it is, nevertheless,
amply proved by history, that the closest contact and consequent
exchange of thought and produce and enlargement of knowledge, between
two otherwise severed nations, is frequently produced by war. War is a
struggle, a state of suffering; but as such, at times, only that
struggling process without which--in proportion to the good to be
obtained, or, as would be a better expression for many cases, to the
good that is to be borne--no great and essential good falls ever to the