VOL. 1. THE CALUMET. JULY AND AUGUST, 1832. NO. S. ADDRESS On the truth, dignity, power, and beauty of the PRINCIPLES OF PEACE, and on the unchristian character and influence of war and the warrior, delivered in the Centre Church of NewHaven, during the Session of the Legislature of Connecticut, at the request of the Connecticut Peace Society, on Sunday Evening the 6th May, 1832; by THOMAS S. GRIMKE, of Charleston, South-Carolina.-Hartford, printed by George F. Olmstead, pp. 56, 8vo. It is not our intention to review this eloquent address. If it were, we might, perhaps follow the modern custom of reviewers and overlook the production reviewed and give our own crude opinions in its room: but it is our intention to give copious extracts from the address, and conclude with a few remarks on Mr. Grimke's opinions concerning These very delicate subjects, defensive war and the American revolution. We give the first 21 pages entire, and also such portions as will best comport with the connection and our scanty limits. WAR is the law of violence, PEACE the law of love. That law of violence prevailed without mitigation, from the murder of Abel to the Advent of the Prince of Peace. During that period of forty centuries, War appeared to be the great end of all the institutions of society. Governments seemed to be successfully organized, only when strong for the destruction of others. Rulers appeared to be fortunate in their administration and illustrous in their achievements, only when marches and battle fields, burning cities and shattered navies were the trophies of their renown. The warrior was the great man of those ages, for his art presented the chief means of aggrandizement, with nations and individuals, al home and abroad.eace, the natural state of man, whether he consnits his duties, his interests or his happiness, was regarded as worthy only of the vulgar, ignorant multitude: and as the natural stat, not of the free, but of the slace. The spirit of all those ages was mbodied in the sentiment of Cleomenes: Homer is the poet of the Spartans, because he ings of War, Hesiod of the Helots, because agriculture is his theme. War, the unnatual state of man if he respects his obligations, welfare and improvement, was considered as the only natural state of government in all its forms of despotism, oligarchy and democracy. Even in the comparatively free states of Greece and Italy, amidst their hideous compounds despotic aristocracy and turbulent licentious democracy, War was the master passion the people, the master spring of government. The republicans of antiquity appear to ve lived in vain, unless they died in battle; and all the vital powers of their government ere so entirely military, that they perished, as soon as they lost the capacity to make war ccessfully. Such institutions and states of society, present one of the most remarkable of of the folly and depravity of man. In them we behold the singular and revolting pectacle of THE PEOPLE Constructing their governments and administering their public oncerns on the cruel, unjust and ruinous maxims of tyrants and conquerors. With War, the prevailing spirit of all their institutions, the republics of antiquity have demonstrathow utterly unfit the people are to govern themselves, if the law of violence be the funmental law of their social compact. They have demonstrated that if nations, though paratively free and enlightened, live by the sword, they shall perish by the sword: That e law of violence is the law of murder to others, of suicide to ourselves. "We might have imagined, if history had not attested the reverse, that an experiment of ur thousand years would have sufficed to prove, that the rational and valuable ends of ciety, can never be attained, by constructing its institutions in conformity with the stan dard of War. But the sword and the torch had been eloquent in vain. A thousand battlefields, white with the bones of brothers, were counted as idle advocates in tho cause justice and humanity. Ten thousand cities, abandoned to the cruelty and licentiousness of the soldiery; and burnt, or dismantled or razed to the ground, pleaded in vain against the law of violence. The river, the lake, the sea, crimsoned with the blood of fellow-citizens and neighbors and strangers, had lifted up their voices in vain to denounce the folly and wickedness of War. The shrieks and agonies, the rage and hatred, the wounds and curses of the batt efield, and the storm and the sack, had scattered in vain their terrible warning, throughout all lands. In vain had the insolent Lysander destroyed the walls and burnt the fleets of Athens, to the music of her own female flute players. In vain had Scipios amid the ruins of Carthage, in the spirit of a gloomy seer, applied to Rome herself the prophecy of Agamemnon, "The day shall come, the great avenging day, In vain had Pyrrhus exclaimed, as for all the warrior gamblers of autiquity, "One such victory more, and I am undone. In vain had the disgrace and the sufferings of Miltiades and Nicias, of Themistocles, Pausanius and Alcibiades; of Marius and Sylla, of Hannibal, Pompey and Cæsar, filled the nations with pity and dismay. The lamentations of the widow and the tears of the orphan, the broken hearts of age and the blasted hopes of youth and beauty and love, had pleaded in vain against the law of violence. The earth had drunk in the lifeblood of the slain, and hidden their mangled bodies in her bosom; and there the garden, the orchard and the harvest flousished once more beautiful in the tints of nature, and rich in the melody of fount, and leaf, and breeze. The waters had swallowed into their depths the dying and the dead, and the ruined fleets both of victor and vanquished; and again the waves danced in their sportiveness, or rushed in their fury over the bat tleplain of hostile navies. The innocence of childhood had forgotten the parent's violent death, the widow had recovered the lost smile of former years, the miserable old man had been gathered to his fathers, and affection had found new objects for its attachments. "The ancient and modern Assyrian, the Babylonish, Median and Persian Empires; the kingdoms of ancient and modern Egypt, of Judah and Israel, and of all the successors of Alaxander; the commercial states of Tyre, and Rhodes, and Carthage, the republics of Greece and Italy, and the barbarians of Spain and Gaul, of Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, had submitted to the all conquering eagle. The terrible judgement, "All they that take the sword' shall perish with the sword," had been written in letters of blood on the land and the ocean, on the palaces of kings, and the cottages of peasants, on the senate houses of the people, and the temples of their false and cruel gods. The Roman empire, the grave of a hundred states, was destined to illustrate more remarkably than all the preceding nations, that the law of violence is a selfdestoyer, remorseless and insatiable. Her powe had been constantly extending, during a period of nearly eight hundred years, till a single city, with its fields, and gardens had swelled to the magnitude of a giant empire, embracing the fairest portions of Africa, Europe and Asia. But her law had ever been and was still the law of violence. Her battle shout of defiance had pierced the deep gloom of the Hercynian forest; and the Goth, the Burgundian, the Vandal and the Hun, came down to the feast of victory, at the trumpet summons. Their progress was terrific, as when the mountain torrent rushes in its fury, to sweep away the vineyard of the harvest, the peasant's cabin, the shepherd and his flock. Again the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. The Pyrenees and the Alps and the Balcan range were feeble barriers against the children of eternal snows; and as the barbarians poured down from those mountain summits the wild music of their battle-songs over the beautiful and delicious regions of Iberia, Italy, and Greece, the Roman empire confessed in her agony of fear, that the sword was her only title to all her dominions, from the rising to the setting sun. What pencil can faithfully picture the terrible realities of that ferocious struggle between the barbarians and the civilized, with all their science and literature, with all their arts of peace and of war? The Roman empire, the mightiest, the most magnificent, the costliest structure of the whole ancient world, perish by the sword and faggot of barbarians, itself the colossal temple of war, the sublime propylaa, that looked abroad over the great desart and up the valley of the Nile: The grand and beautiful portico, that faced the Mediterranean, lay prostrate in ruins. The august colonnades, that towered along the shores of the Atlantic and the banks of the Euphrates, were defaced and shattered. The vast roof, which had sheltered a hundred nations, the walls, whose ample circuit had embraced a continent of territory, were rent, and cast down, and scattered far and wide. Even the very shrine and altar of the god of war, the self-styled eternal city was burnt, and sacked and enslaved by Alaric and Attila, by Genseric, Totila and Theodoric. Of all that spacious and majestic structure, nothing remained in Western Europe, but a chaos of ruins, and here and there a pillar, solitary and solemn, as those of Colonna, Palmyra or Chelminar. The only inscription, which the conquerors vouchsafed for the monument of the most illustrious and powerful of ancient empires, was the prophecy so fearfully fulfilled, hey that take the sword shall perish with the sword." "The provincial military tyranies of imperial Rome, succeeded the feudal aristocracies and monarchies of the victors; whilst the sudden rise and rapid progress of the martial and illustrious dominion of the Saracens, contributed to perpetuate the law of violence. The whole structure of society in the civilized portions of Europe then became more decidedly military, than it had ever been; for the feudal system was singularly adapted to a state of endless warfare, at home and abroad. According to the genius of that system, martial law was the great, the universal law of society. The people as well as the rulers, were all soldiers, and every community exhibited the spectacle of a standing army and a permanent encampment. Age after age rolled away, and at length the arts of peace so far prevailed over those of war, that society lost its military character, but the administration of Government and the spirit of rulers remained the same. The people had indeed been changed, under the influence of religion and letters, of agriculture, manufactures and commerce. They, indeed, had converted their spears into pruning hooks and their swords into plough shares; but the great and permanent institutions of society partook not of the same spirit. The sword was still the sceptre of the monarch, and the casque of the warrior his favorite crown. Governments, instead of being the fountains of peace abroad and happiness at home, became the instruments of misery and injustice, in the hands of conquerors and tyrants, the people, in the mean time, went onward in the improvement of their condition; yet still they exercised comparatively no influence on the character of rulers. Although the institutions of society can have but one rational object, the good of the people, yet the end was for ever sacrificed to the means, the good of the people to the power of rulers. This state of things still prevails, for experience testifies that if the law of war, be no longer the fundamental law of European society, it is still the fundamental law of their governments. The fate of all those nations still depends to a vast extent, on the personal character of monarchs and their counsellors, and such must continue to be the destiny of that continent, until the progress of events shall have reconstructed their governments, and have remodeled the whole s heme of administration in conformity with the great truth, the people are masters, and the rulers, servants. Thus far, the chief responsibility of the rulers has been to the law of violence, to the axe and the scaffold. And although something has been gradually done in some portions of Europe, to meliorate the political condition of the people, and restrain the power and ambition of rulers; yet, if the advancement of reform be in after years, correspondent to the past, the American republic, will number a undred states, before the work shall have been acccomplished Fortunately for the world, it can hardly be said, that there is now in it any state of society, constituted on the principles of war. No military republics, like those of Greece and Rome torment the nations and entail on their own posterity the curse of fire and sword. The feudal system, as the domestic and social constitution of European communities, has utterly perished. We may well be surprised that the Athenians should have petitioned Valentinian for the restoration of the Eleusinian mysteries; but what would be the measure of ur wonder, if the people of western Europe should desire the re-establishment of the power, so tremendously abused by feudal Lords and Monarchs? As soon should we expect the age of Arthur and the Round Table, of Charlemagne and his Paladins to return, as to see the people in any country again, modeled on the military principles of the feudosocial compact. Hence, the great object of reform, is Government, and its reconstruction any where, on principles of responsibility to the people, will be a glorious triumph in the cause of Peace. "It must be obvious, that the interest and happiness of the people, are hostile to war: that if left to themselves, however ignorant and uneducated, they would scarcely ever make war: that of the battles and sieges which have brought such misery into the world, not one in a hundred would have occurred, had it depended on the people; that war has no charms for them; that peace is full of attractions; that all their personal habits and social intercourse, all their employments, affections and duties, are inimical to war and friendly to peace. How demoniac then, is that spirit (and such was the spirit of all the founders of the ancient republics of the feudal states) which debauches the people by ambition and the love of military fame, and breathes into all their institutions, as its living principle the spirit of blo dshed and violence! The good sense, the duties and affections of the people revolt at such things; and the ascendancy of their influence in its natural wholesome state, must exterminate war. "I have said that the most ignorant states of society contain in themselves the elements of Peace, not of War. Who can believe that the mass of society in the countries ravaged |