New Hampshire Statesman And State Journal

CAUSES OF THE CONTINUANCE OF WARS ON THE EARTH.

It has been too much the practice of historians to dwell on the bright points of war, until 'the pomp and circumstance of glorious war has passed into a poet's byword. By bright points here I mean those which appear such to the weak & ignorant, for to all others war has no bright points. Conquerors and kings, and the instruments of kings, be they generals or statesmen, have spread ravage and desolation over the earth, and recorded their fame in characters of blood. And poets and historians have sought immortality in records more horrible even than these; for, by dwelling upon the bright points, by bringing forward the gaudy equipage, the gorgeous drapery, 'the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war,' and throwing into the shade its horrible and revolting features, they have tended to keep up the scourge, to perpetuate the curse, to carry down the degradation through all age, through all generations of the earth.

"Upon the former, the curse which they dealt out to mankind will return, and rest forever upon their unhallowed and blood stained name; but it is the latter that will be visited with the highest measure of punishment, & upon them most assuredly will fall the deepest execrations of their species. Let any man, elevated ever so little by knowledge and civilization above the brutes, fix his attention upon the following picture, and say if he would choose to risk the possibility of subjecting himself and all that is dear to him to so frightful a destiny. The detail is horrible, but it must not, and shall not, be passed over. It would almost defy the imagination to conceive the infamous extravagances, the horrible excesses, which men, released from the only restraint to which they have long been accustomed, military discipline, and who acknowledge no other law, human or divine, are capable of perpetrating. Of such a character were the indignities which Rome had to endure from the soldiers of a Bourbon, more avaricious, more cruel, more dissolute, and more impious than the Goths and Vandals who had formerly conquered her. Beauty, youth, innocence and weakness tortured, and abandoned to ignominy; the most shameful outrages committed on women of the highest rank, and on those consecrated to the service of religion,—the former dishonored in the presence of their husbands and families, the latter violated on the very altars; churches profaned, plundered of their ornaments, and converted into stables; in one part old men, bishops, and cardinals mounted with their faces to the tails, on asses and mules, paraded in the public places, exposed to hootings, to insults, and to blows; in another, processions of soldiers' boys, dressed in sacerdotal robes, counterfeiting the chanting and the ceremonies of religion, having their train borne by prelates reduced to the condition of footmen and lacqueys; here groups of women and girls weeping, dragged with violence by the brigands who had carried them off; there, citizens loaded with irons, lacerated with blows, mutilated and put to the torture, till they discovered the place where they had concealed their treasures; such were a few of the scenes presented on this occasion by the captured city, and enacted by those followers of fame, those renowned foster-babes of gore and glory.—Dr Lardner's Cabinet Library—Historical Memoirs of the House of Bourbon.