490

CONCLUSION.

more warmly or universally approved. The object of all insur-ance, of whatever kind, is, to equalize losses, and to distributeamong many, burthens and calamities, which must otherwise over-whelm an individual.

5. Lastly, the welfare and happiness of mankind, may, beyondmeasure, be advanced, by promoting the spirit and the prevalenceof peace. The calamities, which mankind have suffered from war,are too great to admit of any adequate description. Cicero refersto a treatise, written by Dicaearchus, a copious writer and distin-guished Peripatetic philosopher, concerning the destruction ofmankind (de interitu hominum), in which, it seems, he enumer-ated all the great causes, which have been most destructive tomankind, pestilence, famine, inundations, irruptions of wild beasts,&c.,* — and came to the conclusion, that a vastly greater numberof men had been destroyed by wars and convulsions, than by allother calamities combined.f

Originally, wars knew no other termination than the destructionof one of the parties ; and generally this was not accomplished,without irreparable injury being done to the other. Both partieswere severe, if not equal, sufferers. Revenge and retaliationwere the spirit with which these contests were waged, and theconflicts to which those direful passions led, were, above meas-ure, sanguinary and destructive. “ Ten years were employed,”says Sismondi, “ in subjecting the Gauls to the Romans. And,if we believe the conqueror himself, the conquest was not achiev-ed but by a frightful massacre. Never did man cause so muchblood to flow as Cassar; and, in his narrative, the Gallic nationappears to have been destroyed rather than conquered.”! Pris-oners of war were either indiscriminately put to death on the fieldof battle, or were reserved for the still more cruel fate of torture.Domestic servitude or an enormous ransom was the mildest lot,which, according to universal usage, they could expect. Fre-quently entire countries, in the utter devastation and overwhelm-ing ruin with which they were overtaken, bore melancholy wit-ness of the fierce and unrelenting passions awakened by war.

* Ezekiel xiv. 21. t De Officiis, Lib. II. c. 5.

t Histoire des Francis, Tome I. p. 5; C. Julii Comraent.de Bello Gallieo,passim.