History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

278 HISTORY OF THE PARSIS. [CHAP. VI.

I have the honour to offer, to make you acquainted with the sentiments of the most reflecting portion of the Parsi community on this subject, I trust that you will not consider any apology necessary, but that I shall perform an acceptable service. Iam sure all must feel that great seriousness becomes such a meeting as the present. Of none of the great evils which afflict our race do we form such inadequate conceptions as of the evils of war. War is exhibited to us in the dazzling dress of poetry, fiction, and history, where its horrors are carefully concealed beneath its gaudy trappings ; or we see, perhaps, its plumes and epaulettes, and harlequin finery, we hear of the magnificence of the apparatus, the bravery of the troops, the glory of the victors, but the story of the wholesale miseries and wretchedness and wrongs which follow in its train is untold.

“What nation is not groaning under war-debts, the greatest of national burdens! Had the inconceivable sum wasted in the work of human butchery been applied to promote individual comfort and national prosperity, the world would not now be so far behind as it is in its career of progress. But if the earth has always groaned under the pecuniary expense of war, how much more deeply, in a different sense, has it groaned under the expense of human life incurred in war! It is estimated that not less than eighteen times the present population of the