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The pilgrims, who, through innumerable perils, had reached the gates of Jerusalem, were the victims of private rapine or public oppression, and often sunk under the pressure of famine and disease, before they were permitted to salute the holy sepulchre.
Indeed, it was upon the hapless pacificos that the horrors of war chiefly descended. They were ruined, but that was the least. Their property, the honor of their women, and their lives were held to be the legitimate spoil of any Spanish soldier, and the tacit legalization of loot, rapine, and murder was taken full advantage of.
He laboured successfully to put down the bands of insurgents, whose ravages were inflicted indiscriminately upon foreigners and their own countrymen; nor was he less active in checking the excesses of the military, so long accustomed to rapine and free quarter.
The splendor of the tomb has but attracted the violence of rapine; the sarcophagus has been violated; and while other bodies have quietly returned to their native dust in the bosom of their mother earth, the Egyptian, converted into a mummy, has been preserved only to the insults of curiosity, or avarice, or barbarism.
But rapine admits not faith or partnership; and it was not long before the vanquished beheld their conquerors animated by implacable rage against each other, and suffering in turn the violence and cruelties they had inflicted.
By such a course of thought and reading, I was conducted to the conclusion that the constitution of the United States inaugurated "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty" could not well have been designed at the same time to maintain and perpetuate a system of rapine and murder, like slavery; especially, as not one word can be found in the constitution to authorize such a belief.
"While we recollect the general progress of a war which has been marked with cruelty and rapine; while we survey the ruins of this once flourishing city and its vicinity; while we sympathize in the calamities which have reduced so many of our virtuous fellow-citizens to want and distress, and are anxiously solicitous for means to repair the wastes and misfortunes which we lament," we cannot hearken to these petitions.
Rapine and insolence inflamed the hatred which prevailed between the conquerors and the conquered: want of security among the Irish, introducing despair, nourished still more the sloth natural to that uncultivated people.
Speak! Show yourselves openly as you really are. I have offended you by checking your rapine. You are my enemies and base slanderers." "You recriminate upon my Viziers," interrupted the King; "truth which flows from their mouths confounds you." "Nothing from them can confound me," replied Aladin; "not even the blackness of their calumny. It is coeval with their existence.
It makes the soul melancholy to reflect upon these long, long ages of rapine, destruction and woe.
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