strained our provincial governors from exceeding the bounds of equity and humanity in their administration; and has carried even to our most distant colonies a large share of the freedom, the justice, the ease, the tranquillity, the security, and prosperity of the parent state.* It is this, in fine, which has impressed on the minds of our Magistrates and our Judges that strong sense of duty to God, to man, and to their country, that sacred regard to justice and rectitude, which renders them, beyond all example, impartial, upright, and uncorrupt; which secures to every rank of men the equal benefit of the laws, which extends to the meanest their protection, and brings the greatest under their control.

II. Next to the miseries arising from cruel systems of domestic and civil policy, from bad forms of government, from oppressive laws and

See the excellent Introduction to Mickle's Translation of the Luciad, and Rennel's Memoir on Hindostan. "The Bengal provinces," says the last well-informed and candid writer," which have been in our possession near twenty-three years, have during that whole period enjoyed a greater share of tranquillity than any other part of India, or indeed than those provinces have ever enjoyed since the days of Aurengzebe. And it is a fact not to be controverted, that the Bengal provinces have a better government, and are in a better state as to agriculture and manufacture, than any other of the Asiatic countries, China alone excepted." P. 106.

corrupt forms of judicature, there are few evils more formidable and afflicting than those of war. And here, too, we have a manifest advantage over the ancient Pagans.

In confirmation of

In Christian countries the horrors of war (that severest scourge of the human race) have been greatly mitigated, and their frequency, their duration, and their attendant miseries, considerably diminished. this fact, I would entreat the reader, when he is perusing the history of the ancient states, to pay a little attention to the nature, the origin, the number, the extent, and the continuance of their wars, and to the methods in which they were conducted. We are accustomed, from our infancy, to look on those people with such implicit and almost idolatrous veneration; we are so dazzled with the splendour of their victories, and the glory of their conquests; with the courage, the ardour, the intrepidity, the heroism, the grandeur, and elevation of mind they so frequently displayed; and, above all, we are so charmed with the eloquence and the sublimity with which their martial achievements are recorded by their historians, and immortalized by their poets, that we never think of that horrible inhumanity which was the great promi

nent feature of their character; we never see the torrents of blood they shed, in order to arrive at their favourite object, nor the various and inconceivable miseries they spread throughout the world.

The plain truth is, that they

were the common enemies of mankind; the oppressors, the plunderers, the robbers, and the tyrants of the whole earth. By much the greatest part of their wars were voluntary and unprovoked; were wars of aggression, of interest, injustice, rapine, and ambition. They gave their protection to every one that applied for it, without the least regard to the justice of the cause, for the sole purpose of extending their conquests; and the most solemn treaties were evaded or violated, without the smallest scruple, whenever their interest appeared to require it. A lust of empire, a passion for martial achievements, an insatiable thirst for glory, were the ruling principles of their conduct; and to these every other consideration, however sacred, was made to give way.* Their governments were

• The Athenians (says an historian who knew them well) were formed by nature never to be at rest themselves, nor to allow others to be so. THUCYD., lib. i.

The war against Syracuse, which led to their ruin, was founded in extreme injustice and ambition. The design of

little else than military establishments. Every citizen was a soldier, and every kingdom upon the watch to devour its neighbour. The surest road to the honours of the state was through the field of battle; and men were obliged to force their way by the sword to almost every object of their pursuit.

Whilst every thing thus tended to inflame the fiercest passions of the human heart, no wonder that the wars of the ancients were incessant and sanguinary; that the injustice and wantonness with which they were begun could be exceeded by nothing but the vindictive and implacable spirit with which they were carried on ; the Athenians was, first to subdue Sicily, then Italy, then the Peloponnesus. THUCYD., lib. vi.

They thought it the natural turn of the human mind to grasp at dominion whenever it could be done. They confessed that they acted on this principle themselves, and supposed all other nations did the same. Ib., lib. v.

They thought the shortest road to empire was to assist those that demanded their protection, without minutely inquiring how well they deserved it. Ib.

The Spartans, among one another, gave ample proofs of honour and virtue; but, with respect to the rest of the world, their rule of acting was to consider as honourable whatever was pleasing to them; and as just, whatever was conducive to their interest. Ib.

Let the reader also refer to the shameful perfidy of Posthumius to the Samnites, in Livy, lib. ix., c. 5, 11; and of Æmilius to Perseus, lib. 45, c. 8, 39.

and that the world was consequently for many ages overwhelmed with ruin, desolation, and bloodshed. The savage and cruel treatment of their captives in war is well known to every one in the least acquainted with ancient history; every page of which is polluted with scenes of this nature, too numerous and too horrible to be specified here. It is sufficient to observe, in general, that the loss of thousands in the field was in those ages the least part of the evils of war. Those among the vanquished who survived had reason to envy the lot of those that fell. Perpetual slavery, or an ignominious death (sometimes torture) by the hand of the executioner, were their certain destiny; and even among nations the most polished, and the most celebrated for their private and their public virtue, (such were the pagan notions of virtue,) we are continually shocked with the desolation of whole countries, with the entire destruction of flourishing and opulent cities, and with the indiscriminate massacre and utter extermination, not only of those able to bear arms, but of the most helpless and unoffending part of the inhabitants of every age, sex, and condition. If we go back to the earliest ages of Greece, Homer very honestly and very concisely tells