RIVALRY IN ARMAMENTS. - The neck-and-neck race towards universal bankruptcy in which one nation now vies with another in military expenses, would render each one prosperous beyond example! As time goes on, and the competition becomes more terrible, as the armies of half a century ago, which consisted of 80,000, or 100,000 men, swell to hosts of two, or three, or four hundred thousand, and only desolating conscriptions can supply the vast levies they demand, the problem becomes daily more urgent, and its possible solution more important. The cost of a great European army, such as statesmen deem indispensable at the present day to give the nation supporting it a place among the great continental powers, is from £60,000,000 to £90,000,000 per annum. This charge may, in a certain sense, be considered as doubly imposed on the country; for it has to be raised in money to pay and support the soldier, and it has to be deducted from the productive labor, to which the soldier, if left in his civil capacity, would have contributed. The nation is drained of the finest of its youth, and also compelled to pay down an enormous annual sum to support them in unproductive labor, the per contra of their expenditure in the country neither making up for the loss of their hands, nor for the taxation needed for their payment. To conceive the relief to the revenue, and the impulse given to every kind of free labor by the return of 400,000 men to civil life, is to imagine probably a greater boon to any country in Europe than any territorial conquests, any colonial acquisitions, any mechanical discoveries, or any political reforms could possibly effect; yet this boon is every year further and further away under the present order of things. Frances Power Cobbe.

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SURGERY OF War. Military surgeons necessarily become familiar with facts that would startle and horrify most men. The surgeon-general has lately published a partial report, with results like the following:

"An aggregate of 3,470 wounded for the first two years of the war, and the battle-field lists for 1864-5 include over 114,000 names. These reports, are yet to have added to them the names of those killed in battle. The deaths from disease alone in the first two years were 56,193, those dying while prisoners, or after being discharged for disability, not being included. The mortality from disease was more than five times as great as that of men of the same age in civil life, being 48.7 per 1,000 of the total strength in the first year, 65.2 per 1,000 in the second. The number sick was constantly about 10 per cent. of the strength, and the number of cases treated, including wounds, was 878,918 during the first year, and 1,711,803 during the second."

Just reflect on such facts; and what a horrible idea do they give you of the sufferings and havoc inseparable from war!

THE HIGHER LAW.-Human government is indispensable to the happiness and progress of human society. Hence God, in his wisdom and benevolence, wills its existence, and in this sense, and this alone, the powers that be are ordained by him. But civil government cannot exist if each individual may, at his pleasure, forcibly resist its injunc tions. Therefore, Christians are required to submit to the powers that be, whether a Nero or a slave-catching Congress.

But obedience to the civil rule often necessarily involves rebellion against God. Hence we are warned by Christ and his apostles, and by the example of saints in all ages, in such cases not to obey, but to submit and suffer. We are to hold fast our allegiance to Jehovah, but at the same time not to take up arms to defend ourselves against the penalties imposed by the magistrates for our disobedience. Thus the divine sovereignty and the authority of human government are both maintained.

What was the "den" in which John Bunyan had his vision of the "Pilgrims Progress"? A prison to which he was confined for years for refusing obedience to human laws. And what excuse did this holy man make for conduct often denounced as wicked and rebellious? I cannot obey, but I can suffer.' The Quakers have from the first refused to obey the law requiring them to bear arms; yet they have never been vilified by our politicians as rebels against the powers that be, nor sneered at for their acknowledgment of a "higher " than human law. The Lord Jesus Christ, after requiring us to love God and our neighbor, added, "There is none other commandment greater than these.” -Wm. Jay.

EFFECTS OF WAR. - The wars of civilized nations make very slow changes in the system of empire. The public perceives scarcely any alteration but an increase of debt; and the few individuals who are benefited, are not supposed to have the clearest right to their advantages. If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and after bleeding in the battle grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy; but at the conclusion of a ten-years' war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations? These are the men, who without virtue, labor, or hazard, are growing rich as their country is impoverished. They rejoice when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation, and laugh from their desks at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or a tempest. — Dr. Johnson.

THE TREATMENT DUE TO REBELS.

AN intelligent friend of our cause, in forwarding recently his annual contribution, puts the following query: "Would not a pointed, wellwritten article on the necessity of punishing capitally the leaders in" the late rebellion, while lenity should be shown to the multitude, be timely and useful? Had our government seized and hung from 50 to 100 of the chief conspirators directly on the close of the rebellion, disfranchised every commissioned rebel officer, and confiscated every rebel estate consisting of more than 80 acres, thus reducing the entire oligarchy to poverty, and giving every slave family say 20 acres as a homestead, the rebellion would have been crushed forever."

We must remind our friend, that it is no part of our business as a Peace Society, however settled and sharply defined our convictions as individuals may be, to say how rebels, or any other class of criminals, ought to be treated. Such questions come not within our province, but belong to civil government in its dealings with its own subjects; while we restrict ourselves to the single object of doing away the practice of such governments resorting to the sword as the final arbiter of disputes between themselves. Our cause has just this extent, and no more. What each government may do in its own proper sphere at home; what shall be its form or its powers; who shall be rulers, or how chosen ; what laws shall be enacted, or how enforced; what penalties shall be affixed to specific crimes, or how such penalties shall be inflicted; what means shall be employed by government for maintaining its own authority, and insuring the public peace and the general welfare-such questions, however important and deeply interesting, it is not ours as peacemen to

consider.

On two points of this government question, however, we do, as we must, take implicitly a definite stand the existence of civil government as an ordinance of God, and its right at discretion to enact laws, and put them in execution. Such powers we regard as essential to the very idea of government; and if it may not do these things, it is in truth no government at all. It exists solely for these ends, and deserves the name only so far as it secures them. Having enacted laws, it is bound to see them obeyed, and, when violated, to inflict the penalties prescribed for their violation.

Is treason, then, a crime? If so, it ought, just like any other crime, to be punished with condign severity. So every government says by affixing to it the severest penalties, and thus branding it as the greatest of crimes. So it is in fact; for its very purpose is to break down all law and all authority. It aims a death-blow against the government itself; and hence the latter must either crush the rebellion, or cease to exist in aught but name. It must, as the guardian of the general weal, treat rebellion as the climax and culmination of all crimes. If it fails to do this, it proves itself a traitor to its high trust. It commits a

species of suicide, and would deserve only a suicide's infamous burial. It has no right, as guardian of the public weal, either to tolerate rebellion, or to let the men chiefly responsible for its crimes and calamities, go without the punishment due to their offences.

With these views, we can have no sympathy and little respect for the lenity so strangely shown to the leaders in our late rebellion. Pardon, if you safely can, all the common people that were decoyed or dragged into this great maelstrom of crime; but it would be an outrage on justice, a burlesque and mockery of all government, to let its responsible authors go unpunished. What moral right have we to remit the punishment due for such crimes as they committed? Pardon Jefferson Davis! On the same principle God ought to have pardoned Satan, and received him back to heaven while reeking with all the guilt of his rebellion still upon him. Here is the leader of a rebellion that sought to overthrow our government, and establish on its ruins a slave empire to dominate this continent, that drenched our country for four long years with fraternal blood, filled with sorrow and mourning nearly every house, and either killed or crippled for life a million of men in the bloom or vigor of their days. The man guilty of all this, the greatest criminal of the age, if not of all ages, the man steeped in the guilt of more than half a million murders, shall we hesitate or delay to punish in the way prescribed by our own laws? What is the use of penalty, or law, or government itself, if such a prince of crimi nals is not to be visited with its severest penalties? The guilt of Booth in assassinating President Lincoln was innocence compared with that of Jefferson Davis, who engineered the entire rebellion, and made himself responsible before God and the world for all its waste of property, all its havoc of life, and the whole sweep of its atrocities and horrors! Measured by any standard you please, can there be this side of pandemonium, greater guilt than this? If such a criminal is not to be visited with the severest penalties known to our laws, why keep up the farce of police and courts to punish the thousand comparatively trivial offences that crowd our prisons, or glut the gallows?

Nor have we the slightest sympathy with the logic or the sensibility that would save such a giant offender from condign punishment. Our pity we reserve, as every man should, for the millions who have suffered so much from his villanies. We know nothing that can either excuse or palliate them. He sinned against the clearest light and the strongest motives. He knew well how much mischief he was attempting, coolly planned it all, and persisted in it all just as long as he could. We have reason to believe that he would, if he could, have fought on till not only the South but the whole country should become one vast aceldama and golgotha.

But we are told that Davis has suffered enough already. Let us be thankful that he is feeling at last the suicidal recoil of his own guilt; but is this the punishment due to crime, such as any government, hu man or divine, metes out to offenders? A man, in stealing your purse, burning your house, or taking your life, may involve himself in mani

fold evils; but does justice or common sense accept such consequences of his guilt to himself, as a proper, full punishment of his crimes? The logic is palpably absurd. Would you, on such grounds, have rescued Booth from the gallows?

Equally futile or fallacious is the plea, that we must not punish rebels lest we discourage the friends of freedom in other countries from rebelling against their own governments, or expose them to severe penalties if they should. Queer logic! Here is confessedly a very great crime; but we must not punish it lest, forsooth, we should restrain our friends elsewhere from committing similar crimes, or exposing them, if unsuccessful, to heavy penalties! We must not harm murderers here, lest we tempt government in other countries to inflict the full vengeance of law upon such offenders there! If rebellion is a crime, the greatest of all crimes, it ought to be so treated everywhere; and any other treatment is absurd, and inconsistent with the nature and design of government.

This lenity to treason bodes ill to our country. It is an apology for its vast and far-reaching crimes. It is in fact a sort of premium on rebellion, and practically says to all future rebels, You need not fear much to undertake rebellion. You may indeed fail; but you have nothing to fear beyond that in the way of punishment. True, the laws say it is the greatest of all crimes, and affix the severest penalties; but nobody supposes that these penalties are to be inflicted. Public opinion would denounce the infliction as a cruelty not to be borne in such an age as this! The law and the penalty are both mere bugbears to scare men away from treason.'

In opposition to such morbid sentimentalism, we hold that the perpetrators of crime ought to be punished in proportion to their guilt, and must be if we would prevent the repetition of their crimes. We bear no ill-will to our late rebels; but, having committed crimes that deserve death, they should be made as an example to suffer for the fearful mischief they have done. The ends of justice may doubtless be secured by punishing to the full extent of the law only a few leaders; but a large number of men who entered actively into the rebellion, ought to be punished by fine, confiscation or banishment, and no voluntary, persistent supporter of the rebellion should ever be allowed to take any part whatever in our government. So far they should be perpetual outlaws. The class of men who got up the rebellion, the slave-holding aristocracy, ought to be stripped of their wealth, and their property given in small portions to the poor loyalists at the South, white and black. It is a suicidal clemency that treats them in any other way; and we much fear that the undeserved favor shown to rich, aristocratic rebels will come back upon us in a long train of well-nigh incurable evils.

We may, perhaps, be referred to the Sermon on the Mount, and exhorted to love our enemies, to bless them that curse us, and overcome evil only with good. We have no space now for a full answer to this; but we beg to say that such an application of these and kindred passages would prove all government, both human and divine, to be utterly