mighty influence had grown up a _social_ influence of woman,
which did not exist in pagan ages, and will hereafter be applied to
greater purposes. But, for want of room, I confine myself to saying
a few words on war, and the mode in which it will be extinguished
by Christianity.

WAR.--This is amongst the foremost of questions that concern
human progress, and it is one which, of all great questions, (the
question of slavery not excepted, nor even the question of the
slave-_trade_,) has travelled forward the most rapidly into
public favor. Thirty years ago, there was hardly a breath stirring
against war, as the sole natural resource of national anger or
national competition. Hardly did a wish rise, at intervals, in that
direction, or even a protesting sigh, over the calamities of war.
And if here and there a contemplative author uttered such a sigh,
it was in the spirit of mere hopeless sorrow, that mourned over
an evil apparently as inalienable from man as hunger, as death, as
the frailty of human expectations. Cowper, about sixty years ago,
had said,


'War is a game which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.'


But Cowper would not have said this, had he not been nearly related
to the Whig house of Panshanger. Every Whig thought it a duty
occasionally to look fiercely at kings, saying--'D--, who's afraid?'
pretty much as a regular John Bull, in the lower classes, expresses
his independence by defying the peerage,--'A lord! do you say?