Mahometanism and the Christian church, of the balance of Europe and
the revolution of empires, is little else than a tissue of crimes,
exhibiting nations as if they were so many herds of ferocious animals,
whose genuine occupation was to tear each other to pieces, and to deform
their mother-earth with mangled carcases and seas of blood.

But it is not just that we should establish our opinion of human nature
purely from the records of history. Man is alternately devoted to
tranquillity and to violence. But the latter only affords the proper
materials of narration. When he is wrought upon by some powerful
impulse, our curiosity is most roused to observe him. We remark his
emotions, his energies, his tempest. It is then that he becomes the
person of a drama. And, where this disquietude is not the affair of a
single individual, but of several persons together, of nations, it is
there that history finds her harvest. She goes into the field with all
the implements of her industry, and fills her storehouses and magazines
with the abundance of her crop. But times of tranquillity and peace
furnish her with no materials. They are dismissed in a few slight
sentences, and leave no memory behind.

Let us divide this spacious earth into equal compartments, and see in
which violence, and in which tranquillity prevails. Let us look through
the various ranks and occupations of human society, and endeavour to
arrive at a conclusion of a similar sort. The soldier by occupation,
and the officer who commands him, would seem, when they are employed
in their express functions, to be men of strife. Kings and ministers of
state have in a multitude of instances fallen under this description.
Conquerors, the firebrands of the earth, have sufficiently displayed
their noxious propensities.

But these are but a small part of the tenantry of the many-peopled
globe. Man lives by the sweat of his brow. The teeming earth is
given him, that by his labour he may raise from it the means of his
subsistence. Agriculture is, at least among civilised nations, the
first, and certainly the most indispensible of professions. The
profession itself is the emblem of peace. All its occupations, from
seed-time to harvest, are tranquil; and there is nothing which belongs
to it, that can obviously be applied to rouse the angry passions, and
place men in a frame of hostility to each other. Next to the cultivator,
come the manufacturer, the artificer, the carpenter, t