Enforcement of Law a Peace Measure...165 The War-system more and more expenWesleyan Missions....

..167 sive

English Liberality to Peace......................... ..168 The war in China....

.187

..189

Peace compatible with Government.....170 The clergy instigating war.............191 Training the general mind to War......175 War, by Coleridge.....

.......192

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY.

CONGREGATIONAL LIBRARY BUILDING, CHAUNCEY STREET.

THE

ADVOCATE OF PEACE.

JANUARY AND FEBRUARY, 1861.

THE ENFORCEMENT OF LAW A PEACE MEASURE.

We find, even among men of intelligence, not a little misconception respecting the true sphere and aim of our cause. Peace they seem to regard as a vague term for whatever can subserve the good order or general prosperity of either individuals, families or communities. If there is wrong done or attempted anywhere, it is expected, as a sort of universal remedy, to prevent or repair the mischief. If a family, a school, or a neighborhood, is embroiled; if pirates infest the seas, or villains commit robbery or murder; if a mob prowls through a city, or a rebellion, like that of Shay in Massachusetts, of Dorr in Rhode Island, or the present secessionists in South Carolina, lifts its bold, bloody front, the cause of Peace is required, as a part of its special mission, to meet the case, and thus furnish a sort of general antidote or cure for nearly all social evils.

Such modes of reasoning betray a strange ignorance of the whole subject. Peace a catholicon for the general disorders of society? No; for the cure or control of evils like these, we must look, not to Peace, but to Government, as embodying the expedients and powers specifically requisite for the protection of society. It comes not within the province of Peace to prevent or punish crime in general. If any wrong is done in society, any of its rights or interests put in peril, we have provision to meet the case in a right enforcement of the laws. They were made, and are to be executed, for this specific purpose. Here is the remedy prescribed by God, and applied by man, to prevent or

cure such evils. It is a question, not of Peace, but of Government; and the thing specially needed in such cases, is obedience to law, or a due enforcement of its penalties. If your child or your pupil dis obeys, and thus disturbs your family or your school, what you want is, not a homily on harmony and good feeling, a lullaby to coax or soothe the offender asleep, but a prompt, decisive demand of submission to your authority. The support of government by enforcing its laws, or inflicting its penalties, is in such cases the proper, if not the only sure, means of securing peace.

So everywhere. If an incendiary fires your city or village, do you send a company of peacemen to ply him with their gentle and loving words? No; you would send the police, or a bevy of constables, to arrest him, and bring him to justice. There is no other way at the time of dealing with such men. Would you call this a hard process? Very true; but it is the process which God himself prescribes, as “a terror to evil-doers, a revenger to execute wrath (inflict punishment) upon him that doeth evil." "The way of transgressors" must be hard; and it is the ordering of infinite wisdom and love to make it so.

Now, it is not the proper province of our cause to deal with such cases as these. It is a question, not of peace, but of justice in the execution of law. Government is designed to meet just such cases; and what society needs, and must sooner or later have, is an effective enforcement of its authority. Its laws, by whomsoever violated, whether by few or by many, by an infuriated mob, or a whole province deliberately planning and organizing rebellion, must be put in execution as the specific means provided by society to guard its common rights and interests.

Here, then, is the province of Government, which was made on purpose to keep peace by a prompt, energetic exercise of its authority. Is not this just the way, as all experience proves, to keep peace between families or communities? So on the largest scale. It was Gen. Jackson's firmness in upholding the authority of our National Government, and his inflexible purpose to enforce its laws at all hazards, that restrained Nullification in 1833; and had the same hand held the reins when Border Ruffianism attempted such abominable outrages in Kanzas, it would doubtless have averted nearly all the enormous evils that ensued. So of the wholesale nullification that now assumes the form of Secession at the South. It is, in its origin and its essential character, a question of obedience to government; and a judicious, yet

energetic, unflinching enforcement of its laws would have been precisely the measure of peace needed at the right time to meet the

case.

Has the cause of peace, then, nothing to do with such cases? Not directly, but a great deal by its general influence. While its single object is to abolish the practice of nations appealing to the sword for the settlement of their disputes, and persuade them to supersede its blind, brutal arbitrament by the introduction of laws and courts akin to those which are found in all civilized countries to secure justice between individuals, it inculcates principles, and forms habits, that would be sure to prevent mobs, insurrections, and all kindred disturbances of society. It is a school of obedience to law as the guardian of peace. No people, educated in such views as our cause inculcates, would ever abet or tolerate rebellion, or any violent resistance to "the powers that be." It is the lack of such principles and habits that has occasioned what we now see at the South. Had they been educated to even the lowest views of peace, they would have calmly waited for law, reason and truth, for the use of peaceful means alone, to redress their alleged wrongs. Alas! neither the South nor the North has been trained in any strict principles of peace; and God only knows what may yet be the result of lessons learned by most of us in the school of a bloody revolution. From the seed sown by our fathers in 1776, we are now reaping the bitter but legitimate fruits of 1861. It is too late for our cause to cure the evil. Its work of prevention should have been going on ages ago in such an education of the community as would have rendered rebellion morally impossible. Peace is not a mushroom, the growth of a night, but a sort of century plant, whose fruits ripen only after the lapse of ages in the general habits of a people. The principles of Christian peace have hardly begun as yet to take root among us; but, should they ever overspread the land, and form an integral part of our general character, we shall hear no more of rebellion in any form, nor ever shudder as now at the prospect of seeing our country drenched in fraternal blood. In this view peace is a great want of the world; and may God in his mercy hasten its promised coming!

WESLEYAN MISSIONS.-Through the agency of the English Wesleyan Missionary Society, the Gospel is preached in more than twenty languages at 3,650 places in various parts of Europe, India, China, Southern and Western Africa, the West Indies, Australia, Canada, and British America.

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