WAR, AND THE MEANS OF PREVENTION,
We have endeavored to give the reader some idea of the vast amount of crime and misery resulting from our hos- tilities with Mexico ; yet those hostilities present but a faint image of war. All the American troops sent into Mexico, will not number as many as have often been killed and wounded in a single engagement. Had all the bat- tles of the late war occurred at the same time, and on the same field, they would scarcely have equalled a skirmish between the outposts of two European armies. The total number of our troops officially reported to have been killed in battle, is less than two thousand ! If we would know the horrors of war, not as waged in ancient times, when whole nations contended in arms, with heathen barbarity, but as waged within our own recollection, and by enlightened, civilized, and christian people, let us contemplate the de- tails of only three of a multitude of modern battles.* Jena—engaged, 200,000 men ; killed and wounded, 34,000 Eylaxj «' 160,000 " " 50,000 Borodino " 265,000; 1,230 cannon in the field, 25,000 killed, 68,000 wounded—93,000 Napoleon invaded Russia with 450,000 troops, of which number about 400,000 are supposed to have perished, only about 50,000 having returned to their native land. We shudder to reflect on the awful accumulated misery and crime necessarily resulting from such vast slaughter.
- See Alison.
Let it be also recollected that the horrors of the battle field, form but one item, and that comparatively a small one, in the long caialogue of Avoes, inflicted by war upon the human race. The limits of the present chapter for- bid us to dwell on the anguish experienced by the friends and