Note 187 — MEMOIR OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; CONTINUED, FROM THE TIME OF HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.

“War never fails,” as Dr. Ramsay has justly observed, “to injure the morals of the people engaged in it. The American war in particular,” continues that historian, “had an unhappy influence of this kind. Being begun without funds or regular establishments, it could not be carried on without violating private rights; and in its progress, it involved a necessity for breaking solemn promises, and plighted public faith. The failure of national justice, which was in some degree unavoidable, increased the difficulties of performing private engagements, and weakened that sensibility to the obligations of public and private honour, which is a security for the punctual performance of contracts.”

This is a melancholy but faithful representation of some of the injurious impressions made on the moral sentiments and feelings of the people of this country, by the revolutionary war: evils inseparable from warfare; and such as necessarily spring from a state of things, alike destructive of social order and the refinements of society, as repugnant to the precepts of religion, the dictates of natural justice and the mild suggestions of benevolence.