passionately set on revelry, on expedients for inflaming licentiousness
to madness; or concourses of multitudes for pomps, celebrations, shows,
games, combats; on the riots of exultation and revenge after victories.
The ruder nations had, in their way, however pitiable on the score of
magnificence, their grand festive, triumphal, and demoniac confluxes and
revellings. To these joys of tumult, the people of the savage and the
more cultivated nations sacrificed everything belonging to the peaceful
economy of life, with a desperate, frantic fury. All this was the
confession that there was little felicity in the heart or in the home.
Nor was it found in these resources; if the wild elation might be
mistaken for happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance,
and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness of the soul.

The fact of their being unhappy had a still more gloomy attestation in the
mutual enmity which seems to have been of the very essence of life so
vital a principle, that it could not be spared for an hour. No, they could
not live without this luxury drawn from the fountains of death! What is
the most conspicuous material of ancient history, what is it that glares
out the most hideously from that darkness and oblivion in which the old
world is veiling its aspect, but the incessant furies of miserable mortals
against their fellow-mortals, "hateful and hating one another?" We cannot
look that way but we see the whole field covered with inflicters and
sufferers, not seldom interchanging those characters. If that field widens
to our view, it is still, to the utmost line to which the shade clears
away, a scene of cruelty, oppression, and slavery; of the strong trampling
on the weak, and the weak often attempting to bite at the feet of the
strong; of rancorous animosities and murderous competitions of persons
raised above the mass of the community; of treacheries and massacres; and
of war between hordes, and cities, and nations, and empires; war _never_,
in spirit, intermitted, and suspended sometimes in act only to acquire