Alexandria Gazette

ROUGH AND READY.

THE WAR AND PEACE

We have seen the Union characterizing the present course of the Whigs as inconsistent with their past opposition to the origin and inception of this war. Their past and present sentiments are identical. The Whigs of the land are as much opposed to the course of the Administration in relation to this war, as they ever were.—Every day has brought confirmation to their convictions, and developed new and worse evils and dangers as its consequences. Amid the rejoicings of victory we had mournful mementos of the horrors of war; and even the return of peace brings with it, as the fruit of this unfortunate contest, the promise of one still more dangerous and disastrous at home, arising from the acquisition of territory. Unhappy indeed is that war in which triumph and peace bring fear in stead of hope: they may herald the dawn of better times—

But shadows, clouds and darkness rest upon it.

We regard all wars as unspeakable evils; even when necessary, they are evil; when just and pure, and waged for the highest and holiest objects, they are evil still, and evil altogether. It is not merely the carnage of the battle-field, rill of blood and hillocks of slain, that render war abhorrent—though no good man can think of them without a groan—but its incidental train of horrors—its myriads of innocent victims, females and children—the weak and the unwarrying. It is, beside, the high school of all national and social immorality; it induces a lust of conquest and acquisition that renders every feeble people insecure, and records its career in blackened and depopulated provinces—

It inspires a demoniac appetite for blood—a love of the luxury of strife, the saturnalia of slaughter. A people fully flushed in guilty and successful war, become mad with the passion for wholesale murder; and the sword that finds no foes abroad, soon slakes its thirst in the bubbling veins of friends at home. And in the bloody track of these dark passions follow licentiousness, robbery, the rupture of all holy ties and the subversion of all sacred obligations—

Virtue perishes in an atmosphere tainted with the steam of blood. And liberty does not long survive virtue. An habitual state of warfare must be with us, as it has been with every precedent republic, fatal to all freedom, religious, political and civil. It makes the strong arm a law; and starting with the cry of liberty, closes with military degradation and despotism. For these reasons, we regard all wars as evils—cruel in their carnage, crushing in their oppression—accursed and accursing in their blood-madness their crimes and vices, to the victim and the victor.—North American.