Stood saddled in stable day and night,
Barbed with frontlet of steel, I trow,
And with Jedwood axe at saddle-bow;
A hundred more fed free in stall:
Such was the custom of Branksome Hall."
This also is all changed now.
The principles causing this change are not only active still, but increasing in activity; nor can they be confined to individuals. Nations must soon declare them, and, abandoning martial habiliments and fortifications, enter upon peaceful, unarmed life. With shame let it be said, that they continue to live in the very relations of distrust towards neighbors which shock us in the knights of Branksome Hall, and in the house of Margaret Paston. They pillow themselves on "buckler cold and hard," while their highest anxiety and largest expenditure are for the accumulation of new munitions of War. The barbarism which individuals have renounced nations still cherish. So doing, they take counsel of the wild-boar in the fable, who whetted his tusks on a tree of the forest when no enemy was near, saying, that in time of Peace he must prepare for War. Has not the time come, when man, whom God created in his own image, and to whom he gave the Heaven-directed countenance, shall cease to look down to the beast for an example of conduct? Nay, let me not dishonor the beasts by the comparison. The superior animals, at least, prey not, like men, upon their own species. The kingly lion turns from his brother lion; the ferocious tiger will not raven upon his kindred tiger; the wild-boar of the forest does not glut his sharpened tusks upon a kindred boar.
"Sed jam serpentum major concordia: parcit
Cognatis maculis similis fera: quando leoni
Fortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam