ON WAR.

"What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net purport and upshot of War? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil in the British village of Dumdrudge some five hundred souls. From these, by certain 'Natural Enemies' of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupoise. Nevertheless, amidst much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red, and shipped away at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the South of Spain; and fed there till wanted.

"And now to that same spot in the South of Spain are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'Fire!' is given: and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful Craftsmen, the world has sixty dead Carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. “Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads

shoot.-Alas, so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, 'What devilry soever Kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper.'-In that fiction of the English Smollett it is true the final Cessation of War is perhaps prophetically shadowed forth; where the two 'Natural Enemies,' in person take each a Tobacco-pipe, filled with Brimstone; light the same, and smoke in each other's faces, until the weaker gives-in; but from such predicted Peace-Era what blood-filled trenches and contentious centuries may divide us!"

It were surely a sight to gladden the heart of gods and men to see Beaconsfield and Gortschakoff seated on the summit of the Khyber Pass, puffing brimstone - smoke into each other's old weazened faces with all the vigor left in their wheezy old lungs. Quite worthy of consideration at this time, of all others in modern centuries, is this:

ENFORCED IDLENESS.

"There must be something wrong. A full-formed Horse will in any market bring from twenty to as high as two hundred Friedrichs d'or: Such is his worth to the world. A full-formed Man is not only worth nothing to the world, but the world could afford him a round sum would he simply engage to go and hang himself. Nevertheless, which of the two was the more cunningly devised article, even as an Engine? Good Heavens! A white European Man, standing on his two Legs, with his two five-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones, and miraculous Head on his shoulders, is worth, I should say, from fifty to a hundred Horses."

The foregoing, and some which follow, purport to be marginal notes written by Teufelsdröckh upon a little pamphlet from the brain and pen of a certain Hofrath Heuschrecke (CourtCouncillor Grasshopper), a great admirer of the Weissnichtwo professor. The Hofrath's imaginary pamphlet is entitled "Institute for the Repression of Population." Of this pamphlet and its author, Carlyle, writing in the character of editor of Teufelsdröckh's "Literary Remains," says: "Into the Hofrath's Institute, with its extraordinary schemes and machinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses the Hofrath, something like a fixed idea, undoubtedly akin to the more diluted forms of madness. Nowhere in that quarter of his intellectual world is there light, nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger, open mouths opening wider and wider, a world to terminate by the frightfulest consummation, by its too dense inhabitants famished into delirium, universally eating one another. Wherefore the Hofrath founded, or proposes to found, this Institute of his as the best he can do. It is only with our Professor's comments thereon that we have to do." Councillor Grasshopper has somewhere used the phrase

"too crowded"; whereupon Teufelsdröckh bursts out thus:

A TOO-CROWDED EARTH.

"Too crowded, indeed! Meanwhile, what portion of this considerable terraqueous globe have ye actually tilled and delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the pampas and savannas of America, round ancient Carthage and in the interior of Africa, on both sides of the Altai chain and in the central plateau of Asia, in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim-Tartary, and the Curragh of Kildare? One man in one year, as I understand it, if you give him earth, will feed himself and nine others. Where now are the Hengists and Alarics of our still-growing, still-expanding Europe, who, when their home is grown too strait, will enlist, and like fire-pillars guide onward those superfluous masses of living valor, equipped not now with the battle-axe and the war-chariot, but with the steam-engine and the ploughshare?-Preserving their game."

Few paragraphs have been so often quoted, and fewer still deserve to be so often quoted, as the following, which purports to have been scrawled by Teufelsdröckh upon a blank cover of Heuschrecke's pamphlet:

CRAFTSMAN AND THINKER.

"Two men I honor, and no third. First, the toilworn Craftsman that with Earth-made implement laboriously conquers the Earth, and makes her Man's. Venerable to me is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable too is the

V

The foregoing, and some which follow, purport to be marginal notes written by Teufelsdröckh upon a little pamphlet from the brain and pen of a certain Hofrath Heuschrecke (CourtCouncillor Grasshopper), a great admirer of the Weissnichtwo professor. The Hofrath's imaginary pamphlet is entitled "Institute for the Repression of Population." Of this pamphlet and its author, Carlyle, writing in the character of editor of Teufelsdröckh's "Literary Remains," says: "Into the Hofrath's Institute, with its extraordinary schemes and machinery of Corresponding Boards and the like, we shall not so much as glance. Enough for us to understand that Heuschrecke is a disciple of Malthus; and so zealous for the doctrine that his zeal almost literally eats him up. A deadly fear of Population possesses the Hofrath, something like a fixed idea, undoubtedly akin to the more diluted forms of madness. Nowhere in that quarter of his intellectual world is there light, nothing but a grim shadow of Hunger, open mouths opening wider and wider, a world to terminate by the frightfulest consummation, by its too dense inhabitants famished into delirium, universally eating one another. Wherefore the Hofrath founded, or proposes to found, this Institute of his as the best he can do. It is only with our Professor's comments thereon that we have to do." Councillor Grasshopper has somewhere used the phrase