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191 It is a commonly received opinion, though perhaps more largely entertained by authors than by their readers, that the ever increasing luxury of the present day has do much to weaken the warlike virtures. This opinion I believe is exactly the opposite of the truth; & is merely the echo of the opinion of those writers of Ancient unclear, who made & bequeathed to us a thoroughly mistaken diagnosis of the diseases, & symptoms of the body politic of their own decaying Empire. Our own late wars. but above everything of the kind in modern or ancient times, the late great American war, show how entirely false is their opinion. Never was a war before carried on upon so great a scale, in proportion to the population of the communities? engaging in it; never was a war more deadly; & never before was a war so thoroughly voluntary in the unclear of so large a majority of the unclear rank & file of the combatants. The history of the Seventh New York Volunteers, a regiment of Gentlemen who went out, at the beginning of the war, of their own free will, & went through the whole of it with all its hardships, suffereings, & deadliness, [[wd?] alone disprove their opinion. The hundreds of thousands of men who in the North left their counting houses, their farms, & their drawing rooms to risk health, & limb, & life for an unclear, are just so many hundreds of thousands of arguments against it. And in some respects the argument from the South is still stronger, for these a still larger proportion of the people went to greater hardships, more cruel? wants, &