ic,
before he came to seize and to master it."

We could point to numerous instances, where the benefits of war have
more than compensated for the evils which attended it; benefits not only
to the generations who engaged in it, but also to their descendants for
long ages. Had Rome adopted the non-resistance principle when Hannibal
was at her gates, we should now be in the night of African ignorance and
barbarism, instead of enjoying the benefits of Roman learning and Roman
civilization. Had France adopted this principle when the allied armies
invaded her territories in 1792, her fate had followed that of Poland.
Had our ancestors adopted this principle in 1776, what now had been,
think you, the character and condition of our country?

Dr. Lieber's remarks on this point are peculiarly just and apposite.
"The continued efforts," says he, "requisite for a nation to protect
themselves against the ever-repeated attacks of a predatory foe, may be
infinitely greater than the evils entailed by a single and energetic
war, which forever secures peace from that side. Nor will it be denied,
I suppose, that Niebuhr is right when he observes, that the advantage to
Rome of having conquered Sicily, as to power and national vigor, was
undeniable. But even if it were not so, are there no other advantages to
be secured? No human mind is vast enough to comprehend in one glance,
nor is any human life long enough to follow out consecutively, all the
immeasurable blessings and the unspeakable good which have resolved to
mankind from the ever-memorable victories of little Greece over the
rolling masses of servile Asia, which were nigh sweeping over Europe
like the high tides of a swollen sea, carrying its choking sand over all
the germs of civilization, liberty, and taste, and nearly all that is
good and noble. Think what we should have been had Europe become an
Asiatic province, and the Eastern principles of power and stagnation
should have become deeply infused into her population, so that no
process ever after could have thrown it out again! Has no advantage
resulted from the Hebrews declining any longer to be ground in the dust,
and ultimately annihilated, at least mentally so, by stifling servitude,
and the wars which followed their resolution? The Netherlands war of
independence has had a penetrating and decided effect upon modern
history, and, in the eye of all who value the most substantial parts and
elementary ideas of modern and civ