was frequently invited to the platform. Accordingly, he wrote a lecture,
entitled "Application and Genius," in which he endeavored to show that
there is no such thing as genius, but that all extraordinary attainments
are the results of application. After delivering this lecture sixty
times in one season, he went back to his forge at Worcester, mingling
study with labor in the old way.

On sitting down to write a new lecture for the following season, on the
"Anatomy of the Earth," a certain impression was made upon his mind,
which changed the current of his life. Studying the globe, he was
impressed with the _need_ that one nation has of other nations, and one
zone of another zone; the tropics producing what assuages life in the
northern latitudes, and northern lands furnishing the means of
mitigating tropical discomforts. He felt that the earth was made for
friendliness and cooeperation, not for fierce competition and bloody
wars.

Under the influence of these feelings, his lecture became an eloquent
plea for peace, and to this object his after life was chiefly devoted.
The dispute with England upon the Oregon boundary induced him to go to
England, with the design of traveling on foot from village to village,
preaching peace, and exposing the horrors and folly of war. His
addresses attracting attention, he was invited to speak to larger
bodies, and, in short, he spent twenty years of his life as a lecturer
upon peace, organizing Peace Congresses, advocating low uniform rates of
ocean postage, and spreading abroad among the people of Europe the
feeling which issued, at length, in the arbitration of the dispute
between the United States and Great Britain; an event which posterity
will, perhaps, consider the most important of this century. He heard
Victor Hugo say at the Paris Congress of 1850:--

"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in public museums, just
as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be amazed that such
a thing could ever have been."

If he had sympathetic hearers, he produced upon them extraordinary
effects. Nathaniel P. Rogers, one of the heroes of the Anti-slavery
agitation, chanced to hear him in Boston in 1845 on his favorite subject
of Peace. He wrote soon after:--

"I had been introduced to Elihu Burritt the day before, and was much
interested in his original appearance, and desirous of knowing him
further. I had not formed the highest opinion of his liberality. But on
en