A Federal Office of Peace

Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and American founding father (he signed the Declaration of Independence), wrote an essay in the late-18th century entitled "A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States." He gives several arguments for a new federal office of peace, then proceeds to describe the physical quarters of the peace office--as well as those of the federal office of war.

"In the last place, let a large room, adjoining the federal hall, be appropriated for transacting the business and preserving all the records of this office. Over the door of this room let there be a sign, on which figures of a LAMB, a DOVE and an OLIVE BRANCH should be painted, together with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:

PEACE ON EARTH--GOOD-WILL TO MAN.

AH! WHY WILL MEN FORGET THAT THEY ARE

BRETHREN?

Within this apartment let there be a collection of ploughshares and pruning-hooks made out of swords and spears; and on each of the walls of the apartment, the following pictures as large as the life:

1. A lion eating straw with an ox, and an adder playing upon the lips of a child.

2. An Indian boiling his venison in the same pot with a citizen of Kentucky.

3. Lord Cornwallis and Tippoo Saib, under the shade of a sycamore-tree in the East Indies, drinking Madeira wine together out of the same decanter. 

4. A group of French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm in arm, under a bower erected in the neighborhood of Mons. 

5. A St. Domingo planter, a man of color, and a native of Africa, legislating together in the same colonial assembly. 

A former forest at Flanders Field in Belgium, after repeated
artillery shellings during World War I.
(From: TheHistoryPlace)

To complete the entertainment of this delightful apartment, let a group of young ladies, clad in white robes, assemble every day at a certain hour, in a gallery to be erected for the purpose, and sing odes, and hymns, and anthems in praise of the blessings of peace. 

One of these songs should consist of the following lines.

Peace o'er the world her olive wand extends,

And white-rob'd innocence from heaven descends;

All crimes shall cease, and ancient frauds shall fail, 

Returning justice lifts aloft her scale.

In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign, which is placed over the door of the War Office.

1. An office for butchering the human species. 

2. A Widow and Orphan making office.

3. A broken bone making office.

4. A Wooden leg making office.

5. An office for creating public and private vices. 

6. An office for creating a public debt. 

7. An office for creating speculators, stock Jobbers, and Bankrupts. 

8. An office for creating famine.

9. An office for creating pestilential diseases. 

10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness. 

In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrifying dead bodies, hospitals crouded with sick and wounded Soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any other object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses. 

Above this group of woeful figures,--let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood, 

'NATIONAL GLORY'"

--Benjamin Rush, "A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States." Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical