necessary. But we have found ourselves in a war; the Congress has voted
our money and our men to carry it on; the Governors call for volunteers;
the volunteers come when they are called for. No voice of indignation
goes forth from the heart of the eight hundred thousand souls of
Massachusetts; of the seventeen million freemen of the land how few
complain; only a man here and there! The Press is well-nigh silent. And
the Church, so far from protesting against this infidelity in the name
of Christ, is little better than dead. The man of blood shelters himself
behind its wall, silent, dark, dead and emblematic. These facts show
that it is necessary to speak of the evils of war. I am speaking in a
city, whose fairest, firmest, most costly buildings are warehouses and
banks; a city whose most popular Idol is Mammon, the God of Gold; whose
Trinity is a Trinity of Coin! I shall speak intelligibly, therefore, if
I begin by considering war as a waste of property. It paralyzes
industry. The very fear of it is a mildew upon commerce. Though the
present war is but a skirmish, only a few random shots between a squad
of regulars and some strolling battalions, a quarrel which in Europe
would scarcely frighten even the Pope; yet see the effect of it upon
trade. Though the fighting be thousands of miles from Boston, your
stocks fall in the market; the rate of insurance is altered; your dealer
in wood piles his boards and his timber on his wharf, not finding a
market. There are few ships in the great Southern mart to take the
freight of many; exchange is disturbed. The clergyman is afraid to buy a
book, lest his children want bread. It is so with all departments of
industry and trade. In war the capitalist is uncertain and slow to
venture, so the laborer's hand will be still, and his child ill-clad and
hungry.
In the late war with England, many of you remember the condition of your
fisheries, of your commerce; how the ships lay rotting at the wharf. The
dearness of cloth, of provisions, flour, sugar, tea, coffee, salt, the
comparative lowness of wages, the stagnation of business, the scarcity
of money, the universal sullenness and gloom--all this is well
remembered now. So is the ruin it brought on many a man.
Yet but few weeks ago some men talked boastingly of a war with England.
There are some men who seem to have no eyes nor ears, only a mouth;
whose chief function is talk. Of their talk I will say nothing; we look
for dust in dry places. But some men thus talked of war, and seemed
desirous to provoke it, who can scarce plead ignorance, and I fear not
folly, for their excuse. I leave such to the just resentment sure to
fall on them from sober, serious men, who dare to be so unpopular as to
think before they speak, and then say what comes of thinking. Perhaps
such a war was never likely to take place, and now, thanks to a few wise
men, all danger thereof seems at an end. But suppose it had
happened--what would become of your commerce, of your fishing smacks on
the Banks or along the shore? what of your coasting vessels, doubling
the headlands all the way from the St. John's to the Nueces? what of
your whale ships in the Pacific? what of your Indiamen, deep freighted
with oriental wealth? what of that fleet which crowds across the
Atlantic sea, trading with east and west and north and south? I know
some men care little for the rich, but when the owners keep their craft
in port, where can the "hands" find work or their mouths find bread? The
shipping of the United States amounts nearly to 2,500,000 tons. At $40 a
ton, its value is nearly $100,000,000. This is the value only of those
sea-carriages; their cargoes I cannot compute. Allowing one sailor for
every twenty tons burden, here will be 125,000 seamen. They and their
families amount to 500,000 souls. In war, what will become of them? A
capital of more than $13,000,000 is invested in the fisheries of
Massachusetts alone. More than 19,000 men find profitable employment
therein. If each man have but four others in his family, a small number
for that class, here are more than 95,000 persons in this State alone,
whose daily bread depends on this business. They cannot fish in troubled
waters, for they are fishermen, not politicians. Where could they find
bread or cloth in time of war? In Dartmoor prison? Ask that of your
demagogues who courted war!
Then, too, the positive destruction of property in war is monstrous. A
ship of the line costs from $500,000 to $1,000,000. The loss of a fleet
by capture, by fire, or by decay, is a great loss. You know at what cost
a fort is built, if you have counted the sums successively voted for
Fort Adams in Rhode Island, or those in our own harbor. The destruction
of forts is another item in the cost of war. The capture or destruction
of merchant ships with their freight, creates a most formidable loss. In
1812 the whole tonnage of the United States was scarce half what it is
now. Yet the loss of ships and their freight, in "the late war," brief
as it was, is estimated at $100,000,000. Then the loss by plunder and
military occupation is monstrous. The soldier, like the savage, cuts
down the tree to gather its fruit. I cannot calculate the loss by
burning towns and cities. But suppose Boston were bombarded and laid in
ashes. Calculate the loss if you can. You may say "This could not be,"
for it is as easy to say No, as Yes. But remember what befell us in the
last war; remember how recently the best defended capitals of Europe,
Vienna, Paris, Antwerp, have fallen into hostile hands. Consider how
often a strong place, like Coblentz, Mentz, Malta, Gibraltar, St. Juan
d'Ulloa, has been declared impregnable, and then been taken; calculate
the force which might be brought against this town, and you will see
that in eight and forty hours, or half that time, it might be left
nothing but a heap of ruins smoking in the sun! I doubt not the valor
of American soldiers, the skill of their engineers, nor the ability of
their commanders. I am ready to believe all this is greater than we are
told. Still, such are the contingencies of war. If some not very
ignorant men had their way, this would be a probability and perhaps a
fact. If we should burn every town from the Tweed to the Thames, it
would not rebuild our own city.
But on the supposition that nothing is destroyed, see the loss which
comes from the misdirection of productive industry. Your fleets, forts,
dock-yards, arsenals, cannons, muskets, swords and the like, are
provided at great cost, and yet are unprofitable. They do not pay. They
weave no cloth; they bake no bread; they produce nothing. Yet from 1791
to 1832, in forty-two years we expended in these things, $303,242,576,
namely, for the navy, etc., $112,703,933; for the army, etc.,
190,538,643. For the same time, all other expenses of the nation came to
but $37,158,047. More than eight ninths of the whole revenue of the
nation was spent for purposes of war. In four years, from 1812 to 1815,
we paid in this way, $92,350,519.37. In six years, from 1835 to 1840, we
paid annually on the average $21,328,903; in all $127,973,418. Our
Congress has just voted $17,000,000, as a special grant for the army
alone. The 175,118 muskets at Springfield, are valued at $3,000,000; we
pay annually $200,000 to support that arsenal. The navy-yard at
Charlestown, with its stores, etc., has cost $4,741,000. And, for all
profitable returns, this money might as well be sunk in the bottom of
the sea. In some countries it is yet worse. There are towns and cities
in which the fortifications have cost more than all the houses,
churches, shops, and other property therein. This happens not among the
Sacs and Foxes, but in "Christian" Europe.
Then your soldier is the most unprofitable animal you can keep. He makes
no railroads; clears no land; raises no corn. No, he can make neither
cloth nor clocks! He does not raise his own bread, mend his own shoes,
make his shoulder-knot of glory, nor hammer out his own sword. Yet he is
a costly animal, though useless. If the President gets his fifty
thousand volunteers, a thing likely to happen--for though Irish lumpers
and hod-men want a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, your free
American of Boston will enlist for twenty-seven cents, only having his
livery, his feathers, and his "glory" thrown in--then at $8 a month,
their wages amount to $400,000 a month. Suppose the present Government
shall actually make advantageous contracts, and the subsistence of the
soldier cost no more than in England, or $17 a month, this amounts to
$850,000. Here are $1,250,000 a month to begin with. Then, if each man
would be worth a dollar a day at any productive work, and there are 26
work days in the month, here are $1,300,000 more to be added, making
$2,550,000 a month for the new army of occupation. This is only for the
rank and file of the army. The officers, the surgeons, and the
chaplains, who teach the soldiers to _wad_ their muskets with the leaves
of the Bible, will perhaps cost as much more; or, in all, something more
than $5,000,000 a month. This of course does not include the cost of
their arms, tents, ammunition, baggage, horses, and hospital stores, nor
the 65,000 gallons of whiskey which the government has just advertised
for! What do they give in return? They will give us three things, valor,
glory, and--talk; which, as they are not in the price current, I must
estimate as I can, and set them all down in one figure = 0; not worth
the whiskey they cost.
New England is quite a new country. Seven generations ago it was a
wilderness; now it contains about 2,500,000 souls. If you were to pay
all the public debts of these States, and then, in fancy, divide all the
property therein by the population, young as we are, I think you would
find a larger amount of value for each man than in any other country in
the world, not excepting England. The civilization of Europe is old; the
nations old, England, France, Spain, Austria, Italy, Greece; but they
have wasted their time, their labor and their wealth in war, and so are
poorer than we upstarts of a wilderness. We have fewer fleets, forts,
cannon and soldiers for the population, than any other "Christian"
country in the world. This is one main reason why we have no national
debt; why the women need not toil in the hardest labor of the fields,
the quarries and the mines; this is the reason that we are well fed,
well clad, well housed; this is the reason that Massachusetts can afford
to spend $1,000,000 a year for her public schools! War, wasting a
nation's wealth, depresses the great mass of the people, but serves to
elevate a few to opulence and power. Every despotism is established and
sustained by war. This is the foundation of all the aristocracies of the
old world, aristocracies of blood. Our famous men are often ashamed that
their wealth was honestly got by working, or peddling, and foolishly
copy the savage and bloody emblems of ancient heraldry in their assumed
coats of arms, industrious men seeking to have a griffin on their seal!
Nothing is so hostile to a true democracy as war. It elevates a few,
often bold, bad men, at the expense of the many, who pay the money and
furnish the blood for war.
War is a most expensive folly. The revolutionary war cost the General
Government directly and in specie $135,000,000. It is safe to estimate
the direct cost to the individual States also at the same sum,
$135,000,000; making a total of $270,000,000. Considering the
interruption of business, the waste of time, property and life, it is
plain that this could not have been a fourth part of the whole. But
suppose it was a third, then the whole pecuniary cost of the war would
be $810,000,000. At the beginning of the Revolution the population was
about 3,000,000; so that war, lasting about eight years, cost $270 for
each person. To meet the expenses of the war each year there would have
been required a tax of $33.75 on each man, woman and child!
In the Florida war we spent between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, as an
eminent statesman once said, in fighting five hundred invisible Indians!
It is estimated that the fortifications of the city of Paris, when
completely furnished, will cost more than the whole taxable property of
Massachusetts, with her 800,000 souls. Why, this year our own grant for
the army is $17,000,000. The estimate for the navy is $6,000,000 more;
in all $23,000,000. Suppose, which is most unlikely, that we should pay
no more, why, that sum alone would support public schools, as good and
as costly as those of Massachusetts, all over the United States,
offering each boy and girl, bond or free, as good a culture as they get
here in Boston, and then leave a balance of $3,000,000 in our hands! We
pay more for ignorance than we need for education! But $23,000,000 is
not all we must pay this year. A great statesman has said, in the
Senate, that our war expenses at present are nearly $500,000 a day, and
the President informs your Congress that $22,952,904 more will be wanted
for the army and navy before next June!
For several years we spent directly more than $21,000,000 for war
purposes, though in time of peace. If a railroad cost $30,000 a mile,
then we might build 700 miles a year for that sum, and in five years
could build a railroad therewith from Boston to the further side of
Oregon. For the war money we paid in forty-two years, we could have had
more than 10,000 miles of railroad, and, with dividends at seven per
cent., a yearly income of $21,210,000. For military and naval affairs,
in eight years, from 1835 to 1843, we paid $163,336,717. This alone
would have made 5,444 miles of railroad, and would produce at seven per
cent., an annual income of $11,433,569.19.
In Boston there are nineteen public grammar schools, a Latin and English
High school. The buildings for these schools twenty in number, have cost
$653,208. There are also 135 primary schools, in as many houses or
rooms. I know not their value, as I think they are not all owned by the
city. But suppose them to be worth $150,000. Then all the school-houses
of this city have cost $803,208. The cost of these 156 schools for this
year is estimated at $172,000. The number of scholars in them is 16,479.
Harvard University, the most expensive college in America, costs about
$46,000 a year. Now the ship Ohio, lying here in our harbor, has cost
$834,845, and we pay for it each year $220,000 more. That is, it has
cost $31,637 more than these 155 school-houses of this city, and costs
every year $2,000 more than Harvard University, and all the public
schools of Boston!
The military academy at West Point contains two hundred and thirty-six
cadets; the appropriation for it last year, was $138,000, a sum greater
I think, than the cost of all the colleges in Maine, New Hampshire,
Vermont and Massachusetts, with their 1,445 students.
The navy-yard at Charlestown, with its ordnance, stores, etc., cost
$4,741,000. The cost of the 78 churches in Boston is $3,246,500; the
whole property of Harvard University is $703,175; the 155 school-houses
of Boston are worth $803,208; in all $4,752,883. Thus the navy-yard at
Charlestown has cost almost as much as the 78 churches and the 155
school-houses of Boston, with Harvard College, its halls, libraries, all
its wealth thrown in. Yet what does it teach?
Our country is singularly destitute of public libraries. You must go
across the ocean to read the history of the Church or State; all the
public libraries in America cannot furnish the books referred to in
Gibbon's Rome, or Gieseler's History of the Church. I think there is no
public library in Europe which has cost three dollars a volume. There
are six: the Vatican, at Rome; the Royal, at Paris; the British Museum,
at London; the Bodleian, at Oxford; the University Libraries at
Gottingen and Berlin--which contain, it is said, about 4,500,000
volumes. The recent grant of $17,000,000 for the army is $3,500,000 more
than the cost of those magnificent collections!
There have been printed about 3,000,000 different volumes, great and
little, within the last 400 years. If the Florida war cost but
$30,000,000, it is ten times more than enough to have purchased one copy
of each book ever printed, at one dollar a volume, which is more than
the average cost.
Now all these sums are to be paid by the people, "the dear people," whom
our republican demagogues love so well, and for whom they spend their
lives, rising early, toiling late, those self-denying heroes, those
sainted martyrs of the republic, eating the bread of carefulness for
them alone! But how are they to be paid? By a direct tax levied on all
the property of the nation, so that the poor man pays according to his
little, and the rich man in proportion to his much, each knowing when he
pays and what he pays for? No such thing; nothing like it. The people
must pay and not know it; must be deceived a little, or they would not
pay after this fashion! You pay for it in every pound of sugar, copper,
coal, in every yard of cloth; and if the counsel of some lovers of the
people be followed, you will soon pay for it in each pound of coffee and
tea. In this way the rich man always pays relatively less than the poor;
often a positively smaller sum. Even here I think that three-fourths of
all the property is owned by one-fourth of the people, yet that
three-fourths by no means pays a third of the national revenue. The tax
is laid on things men cannot do without,--sugar, cloth, and the like.
The consumption of these articles is not in proportion to wealth but
persons. Now the poor man, as a general rule, has more children than the
rich, and the tax being more in proportion to persons than property, the
poor man pays more than the rich. So a tax is really laid on the poor
man's children to pay for the war which makes him poor and keeps him
poor. I think your captains and colonels, those sons of thunder and
heirs of glory, will not tell you so. They tell you so! They know it!
Poor brothers, how could they? I think your party newspapers, penny or
pound, will not tell you so; nor the demagogues, all covered with glory
and all forlorn, who tell the people when to hurrah and for what! But if
you cipher the matter out for yourself you will find it so, and not
otherwise. Tell the demagogues, whig or democrat, that. It was an old
Roman maxim, "The people wished to be deceived; let them." Now it is
only practised on; not repeated--in public.
Let us deal justly even with war, giving that its due. There is one
class of men who find their pecuniary advantage in it. I mean army
contractors, when they chance to be favorites of the party in power; men
who let steamboats to lie idle at $500 a day. This class of men rejoice
in a war. The country may become poor, they are sure to be rich. Yet
another class turn war to account, get the "glory," and become important
in song and sermon. I see it stated in a newspaper that the Duke of
Wellington has received, as gratuities for his military services,
$5,400,000, and $40,000 a year in pensions!
* * * * *
But the waste of property is the smallest part of the evil. The waste of
life in war is yet more terrible. Human life is a sacred thing. Go out
into the lowest street of Boston; take the vilest and most squalid man
in that miserable lane, and he is dear to some one. He is called
brother; perhaps husband; it may be father; at least, son. A human
heart, sadly joyful, beat over him before he was born. He has been
pressed fondly to his mother's arms. Her tears and her smiles have been
for him; perhaps also her prayers. His blood may be counted mean and
vile by the great men of the earth who love nothing so well as the dear
people, for he has no "coat of arms," no liveried servant to attend him,
but it has run down from the same first man. His family is ancient as
that of the most long descended king. God made him; made this splendid
universe to wait on him and teach him; sent his Christ to save him. He
is an immortal soul. Needlessly to spill that man's blood is an awful
sin. It will cry against you out of the ground--Cain! where is thy
brother? Now in war you bring together 50,000 men like him on one side,
and 50,000 of a different nation on the other. They have no natural
quarrel with one another. The earth is wide enough for both; neither
hinders the sun from the other. Many come unwillingly; many not knowing
what they fight for. It is but accident that determines on which side
the man shall fight. The cannons pour their shot--round, grape,
canister; the howitzers scatter their bursting shells; the muskets rain
their leaden death; the sword, the bayonet, the horses' iron hoof, the
wheels of the artillery, grind the men down into trodden dust. There
they lie, the two masses of burning valor, extinguished, quenched, and
grimly dead, each covering with his body the spot he defended with his
arms. They had no quarrel; yet they lie there, slain by a brother's
hand. It is not old and decrepid men, but men of the productive age,
full of lusty life.
But it is only the smallest part that perish in battle. Exposure to
cold, wet, heat; unhealthy climates, unwholesome food, rum, and forced
marches, bring on diseases which mow down the poor soldiers worse than
musketry and grape. Others languish of wounds, and slowly procrastinate
a dreadful and a tenfold death. Far away, there are widows, orphans,
childless old fathers, who pore over the daily news to learn at random
the fate of a son, a father, or a husband! They crowd disconsolate into
the churches, seeking of God the comfort men took from them, praying in
the bitterness of a broken heart, while the priest gives thanks for "a
famous victory," and hangs up the bloody standard over his pulpit!
When ordinary disease cuts off a man, when he dies at his duty, there is
some comfort in that loss. "It was the ordinance of God," you say. You
minister to his wants; you smoothe down the pillow for the aching head;
your love beguiles the torment of disease, and your own bosom gathers
half the darts of death. He goes in his time and God takes him. But when
he dies in such a war, in battle, it is man who has robbed him of life.
It is a murderer that is butchered. Nothing alleviates that bitter,
burning smart!
Others not slain are maimed for life. This has no eyes; that no hands;
another no feet nor legs. This has been pierced by lances, and torn with
the shot, till scarce any thing human is left. The wreck of a body is
crazed with pains God never meant for man. The mother that bore him
would not know her child. Count the orphan asylums in Germany and
Holland; go into the hospital at Greenwich, that of the invalids in
Paris, you see the "trophies" of Napoleon and Wellington. Go to the
arsenal at Toulon, see the wooden legs piled up there for men now active
and whole, and you will think a little of the physical horrors of war.
In Boston there are perhaps about 25,000 able-bodied men between 18 and
45. Suppose them all slain in battle, or mortally hurt, or mown down by
the camp-fever, vomito, or other diseases of war, and then fancy the
distress, the heart-sickness amid wives, mothers, daughters, sons and
fathers, here! Yet 25,000 is a small number to be murdered in "a famous
victory;" a trifle for a whole "glorious campaign" in a great war. The
men of Boston are no better loved than the men of Tamaulipas. There is
scarce an old family, of the middle class, in all New England, which did
not thus smart in the Revolution; many, which have not, to this day,
recovered from the bloody blow then falling on them. Think, wives, of
the butchery of your husbands; think, mothers, of the murder of your
sons!
Here, too, the burden of battle falls mainly on the humble class. They
pay the great tribute of money; they pay also the horrid tax of blood.
It was not your rich men who fought even the Revolution; not they. Your
men of property and standing were leaguing with the British, or fitting
out privateers when that offered a good investment, or buying up the
estates of more consistent tories; making money out of the nation's dire
distress! True, there were most honorable exceptions; but such, I think,
was the general rule. Let this be distinctly remembered, that the burden
of battle is borne by the humble classes of men; they pay the vast
tribute of money; the awful tax of blood! The "glory" is got by a few;
poverty, wounds, death, are for the people!
Military glory is the poorest kind of distinction, but the most
dangerous passion. It is an honor to man to be able to mould iron; to be
skilful at working in cloth, wood, clay, leather. It is man's vocation
to raise corn, to subdue the rebellious fibre of cotton and convert it
into beautiful robes, full of comfort for the body. They are the heroes
of the race who abridge the time of human toil and multiply its results;
they who win great truths from God, and send them to a people's heart;
they who balance the many and the one into harmonious action, so that
all are united and yet each left free. But the glory which comes of
epaulets and feathers; that strutting glory which is dyed in blood--what
shall we say of it? In this day it is not heroism; it is an imitation of
barbarism long ago passed by. Yet it is marvellous how many men are
taken with a red coat! You expect it in Europe, a land of soldiers and
blood. You are disappointed to find that here the champions of force
should be held in honor, and that even the lowest should voluntarily
enroll themselves as butchers of men!