XX PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. 



great portion of the governments which have existed, have been little else than 

 an unmitigated curse to mankind. The accumulation of wealth, the acquisition 

 of territory, family aggrandizement, purposes of purely selfish ambition, the 

 mere pomp and luxuries of life, military domination and despotism, have been 

 almost the sole purposes aimed at by the governments of the world. The only 

 legitimate purposes of government are the security and welfare of the gov 

 erned; but how little have these been regarded ! how often entirely overlooked ! 

 Holding, as I do, all offensive war, of every description, and under any pretext, 

 as a crime against humanity and against God, one s heart bleeds at the recitals 

 of history, which seem little else than recitals of bloody conquests and human 

 slaughter, of wasted fields, of famishing millions, and of sacked and burning 

 villages. If the millions and millions of laboring hands, of sacrificed lives, and 

 of hardly-earned treasures, which have been worse than squandered upon these 

 wicked objects, had been devoted to the subjugation and cultivation of the waste 

 places of the earth, and, instead of attempts to destroy, society had devoted itself 

 to attempts to save life, and to the production of food and the multiplication of 

 the comforts and innocent luxuries of mankind, how different would have been 

 the result ! 



What an extraordinary moral anomaly, if so it may be called, does France at 

 this moment present a nation on the verge of bankruptcy, burdened with exces 

 sive taxation, with an army of four hundred thousand men, and more than nineteen 

 millions of acres of unoccupied land, all susceptible of cultivation, and of feeding 

 and clothing millions ! Does Great Britain furnish no parallel to this monstrous 

 fact ? With an increasing national debt, whose payment is perfectly hopeless, 

 a weight of taxation the subject of universal complaint, millions upon millions 

 lavished upon her armies and navies ; workhouses and prisons filled to repletion, 

 thousands and hundreds of thousands upon the verge of starvation ; and in the 

 two great islands, resplendent with the brightest lights of civilization, more than 

 thirteen millions of acres of unoccupied land, and even her cultivated soil, with 

 an improved agriculture, capable of sustaining in plenty three times the number 

 of those who now draw nourishment from her breast. What a singular con 

 juncture of circumstances ! 



Are not these monstrous facts, deeply distressing to philanthropy, deeply 

 wounding to human pride ? We may well ask, If in two of the most enlight 

 ened, the most civilized, and the most polished nations which have ever existed, 

 nothing better has been attained, or rather so much remains unaccomplished for 

 human comfort, such a mass of human crime and misery remains unreached and 

 unalleviated ; have we not some reason to ask, what are the blessings, and what 

 are the triumphs of civilization ? We have a right to demand whether the true 



