Few people need to be told--that associations exist up and down
Christendom, having the ambitious object of abolishing war. Some go so
far as to believe that this evil of war, so ubiquitous, so ancient and
apparently so inalienable from man's position upon earth, is already
doomed; that not the private associations only, but the prevailing
voice of races the most highly civilized, may be looked on as tending to
confederation against it; that sentence of extermination has virtually
gone forth, and that all which remains is gradually to execute that
sentence. Conscientiously I find myself unable to join in these views.
The project seems to me the most romantic of all romances in the course
of publication. Consequently, when asked to become a member in any such
association, I have always thought it most respectful, because most
sincere, to decline. Yet, as it is painful to refuse all marks of
sympathy with persons whose motives one honors, I design at my death to
bequeath half-a-crown to the chief association for extinguishing war;
the said half-crown to be improved in all time coming for the benefit of
the association, under the trusteeship of Europe, Asia, and America,
but not of Africa. I really dare not trust Africa with money, she is not
able as yet to take care of herself. This half-crown, a fund that will
overshadow the earth before it comes to be wanted under the provisions
of my will, is to be improved at any interest whatever--no matter what;
for the vast period of the accumulations will easily make good any
tardiness of advance, long before the time comes for its commencing
payment; a point which will be soon understood from the following
explanation, by any gentleman that hopes to draw upon it.
There is in Ceylon a granite _cippus_, or monumental pillar, of
immemorial antiquity; and to this pillar a remarkable legend is
attached. The pillar measures six feet by six, _i. e._ thirty-six
square feet, on the flat tablet of its horizontal surface; and in height
several _riyanas_, (which arc Ceylonese cubits of eighteen inches each,)
but of these cubits, there are either eight or twelve; excuse me for
having forgotten which. At first, perhaps, you will be angry, viz.,
when you hear that this simple difference of four cubits, or six feet,
measures a difference for your expectations, whether you count your
expectations in kicks or halfpence, that absolutely strikes horror into
arithmetic. The singularity of the case is, that the very solemnity of
the legend and the wealth of the human race in time, depend upon the
cubical contents of the monument, so that a loss of one granite chip is
a loss of a frightful infinity; yet, again, for that very reason, the
loss of all _but_ a chip, leaves behind riches so appallingly too rich,
that everybody is careless about the four cubits. Enough is as good as
a feast. Two bottomless abysses take as much time for the diver as ten;
and five eternities are as frightful to look down as four-and-twenty. In
the Ceylon legend all turns upon the inexhaustible series of ages which
this pillar guarantees. But, as one inexhaustible is quite enough for
one race of men, and you are sure of more by ineffable excess than you
can use in any private consumption of your own, you become generous;
'and between friends,' you say, in accepting my apologies for the
doubtful error as to the four cubits, 'what signifies an infinity more
or less?'
For the Ceylonese legend is this, that once in every hundred years
an angel visits this granite pillar. He is dressed in a robe of
white muslin, muslin of that kind which the Romans called _aura
textilis_--woven, as might seem, from zephyrs or from pulses of the air,
such in its transparency, such in its gossamer lightness. Does the angel
touch the pillar with his foot? Oh no! Even _that_ would be something,
but even _that_ is not allowed. In his soundless flight across it, he
suffers the hem of his impalpable robe to sweep the surface as softly
as a moon-beam. So much and no more of pollution he endures from contact
with earthly objects. The lowest extremity of his dress, but with the
delicacy of light, grazes the granite surface. And _that_ is all the
attrition which the sacred granite receives in the course of any one
century, and this is all the progress which we, the poor children of
earth, in any one century make towards the exhaustion of our earthly
imprisonment. But, argues the subtle legend, even _that_ attrition,
when weighed in metaphysical scales, cannot be denied its value; it
has detached from the pillar an atom (no matter that it is an invisible
atom) of granite dust, the ratio of which atom to a grain avoirdupois,
if expressed as a fraction of unity, would by its denominator stretch
from the Accountant-General's office in London to the Milky Way. Now
the total mass of the granite represents, on this scheme of payment, the
total funded debt of man's race to Father Time and earthly corruption;
all this intolerable score, chalked up to our debit, we by ourselves and
our representatives have to rub off, before the granite will be rubbed
away by the muslin robe of the proud flying angel, (who, if he were a
good fellow, might just as well give a sly kick with his heel to
the granite,) before time will be at an end, and the burden of flesh
accomplished. But you hear it expressed in terms that will astonish
Baron Rothschild, what is the progress in liquidation which we make
for each particular century. A billion of centuries pays off a quantity
equal to a pinch of snuff. Despair seizes a man in contemplating a
single _coupon_, no bigger than a visiting card, of such a stock as
this; and behold we have to keep on paying away until the total granite
is reduced to a level with a grain of mustard-seed. But when that is
accomplished, thank heaven, our last generation of descendants will
be entitled to leave at Master Time's door a visiting card, which the
meagre shadow cannot refuse to take, though he will sicken at seeing it;
viz., a P. P. C. card, upon seeing which, the old thief is bound to give
receipt in full for all debts and pretended arrears.
The reader perhaps knows of debts on both sides the Atlantic that have
no great prospect of being paid off sooner than this in Ceylon.
And naturally, to match this order of debts, moving off so slowly, there
are funds that accumulate as slowly. My own funded half-crown is an
illustration. The half-crown will travel in the inverse order of the
granite pillar. The pillar and the half-crown move upon opposite tacks;
and there _is_ a point of time (which it is for Algebra to investigate)
when they will cross each other in the exact moment of their several
bisections--my aspiring half-crown tending gradually towards the fixed
stars, so that perhaps it might be right to make the man in the moon
trustee for that part of the accumulations which rises above the optics
of sublunary bankers; whilst the Ceylon pillar is constantly unweaving
its own granite texture, and dwindling earthwards. It is probable that
each of the parties will have reached its consummation about the same
time. What is to be done with the mustard-seed, Ceylon has forgotten to
say. But what is to be done with the half-crown and its surplus, nobody
can doubt after reading my last will and testament. After reciting a few
inconsiderable legacies to the three continents, and to the man in the
moon, for any trouble they may have had in managing the hyperbolical
accumulations, I go on to observe, that, when war is reported to have
taken itself off for ever, 'and no mistake,' (because I foresee many
false alarms of a perpetual peace,) a variety of inconveniences will
arise to all branches of the United Service, including the Horse
Marines. Clearly there can be no more half-pay; and even more clearly,
there is an end to full-pay. Pensions are at an end for 'good service.'
Allowances for wounds cannot be thought of, when all wounds shall have
ceased except those from female eyes--for which the Horse Guards is too
little advanced in civilization to make any allowance at all. Bargains
there will be no more amongst auctions of old Government stores.
Birmingham will be ruined, or so much of it as depended on rifles. And
the great Scotch works on the river Carron will be hungering for beef,
so far as Carron depended for beef upon carronades. Other arrears of
evil will stretch after the extinction of war.
Now upon my half-crown fund (which will be equal to anything by the time
it is wanted) I charge once and for ever the general relief of all these
arrears--of the poverty, the loss, the bankruptcy, arising by reason
of this _quietus_ of final extinction applied to war. I charge the fund
with a perpetual allowance of half-pay to all the armies of earth;
or indeed, whilst my hand is in, I charge it with _full_ pay. And I
strictly enjoin upon my trustees and executors, but especially upon
the man in the moon, if his unsocial lip has left him one spark
of gentlemanly feeling, that he and they shall construe all claims
liberally; nay, with that riotous liberality which is safe and becoming,
when applied to a fund so inexhaustible. Yes, reader, my fund will be
inexhaustible, because the period of its growth will be measured by the
concurrent deposition of the Ceylon mustard-seed from the everlasting
pillar.
Yet why, or on what principle? It is because I see, or imagine that
I see, a twofold necessity for war--necessity in two different
senses--1st, a physical necessity arising out of man's nature when
combined with man's situation; a necessity under which war may be
regarded, if you please, as a nuisance, but as a nuisance inalienable
from circumstances essential to human frailty. 2dly, a moral necessity
connected with benefits of compensation, such as continually lurk in
evils acknowledged to be such--a necessity under which it becomes lawful
to say, that war _ought_ to exist as a balance to opposite tendencies of
a still more evil character. War is the mother of wrong and spoliation:
war is a scourge of God--granted; but, like other scourges in the
divine economy, war purifies and redeems itself in its character of a
counterforce to greater evils that could not otherwise be intercepted or
redressed. In two different meanings we say that a thing is necessary;
either in that case where it is inexorably forced on by some sad
overruling principle which it is vain to fight against, though all good
men mourn over its existence and view it as an unconditional evil; or
secondly, in that case, where an instrument of sorrowful consequences
to man is nevertheless invoked and postulated by man's highest moral
interests, is nevertheless clamorously indicated as a blessing when
looked at in relation to some antagonist cause of evil for which it
offers the one only remedy or principle of palliation. The very evil
and woe of man's condition upon earth may be oftentimes detected in
the necessity of looking to some other woe as the pledge of its
purification; so that what separately would have been hateful for
itself, passes mysteriously into an object of toleration, of hope, or
even of prayer, as a counter-venom to the taint of some more mortal
poison. Poverty, for instance, is in both senses necessary for man.
It is necessary in the same sense as thirst is necessary (_i. e._
inevitable) in a fever--necessary as one corollary amongst many others,
from the eternal hollowness of all human efforts for organizing any
perfect model of society--a corollary which, how gladly would all of us
unite to cancel, but which our hearts suggest, which Scripture solemnly
proclaims, to be ineradicable from the land. In this sense, poverty is a
necessity over which we _mourn_,--as one of the dark phases that
sadden the vision of human life. But far differently, and with a stern
gratitude, we recognize another mode of necessity for this gloomy
distinction--a call for poverty, when seen in relation to the manifold
agencies by which it developes human energies, in relation to the trials
by which it searches the power of patience and religion, in relation to
the struggles by which it evokes the nobilities of fortitude; or again,
amongst those who are not sharers in these trials and struggles, but
sympathizing spectators, in relation to the stimulation by which it
quickens wisdom that watches over the causes of this evil, or by which
it vivifies the spirit of love that labors for its mitigation. War
stands, or seems to stand, upon the same double basis of necessity; a
primary necessity that belongs to our human degradations, a secondary
one that towers by means of its moral relations into the region of our
impassioned exaltations. The two propositions on which I take my stand
are these. _First_, that there are nowhere latent in society any powers
by which it can effectually operate on war for its extermination. The
machinery is not there. The game is not within the compass of the cards.
_Secondly_, that this defect of power is, though sincerely I grieve in
avowing such a sentiment, and perhaps (if an infirm reader had his eye
upon me) I might seem, in sympathy with his weakness, to blush--not
a curse, no not at all, but on the whole a blessing from century to
century, if it is an inconvenience from year to year. The Abolition
Committees, it is to be feared, will be very angry at both propositions.
Yet, Gentlemen, hear me--strike, but hear me. I believe that's a sort of
plagiarism from Themistocles. But never mind. I have as good a right to
the words, until translated back into Greek, as that most classical of
yellow admirals. '_Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!_'
The first proposition is, that war _cannot_ be abolished. The second,
and more offensive--that war ought not to be abolished. First,
therefore, concerning the first. One at a time. Sufficient for the page
is the evil thereof! How came it into any man's heart, first of all,
to conceive so audacious an idea as that of a conspiracy against war?
Whence could he draw any vapor of hope to sustain his preliminary steps?
And in framing his plot, which way did he set his face to look out
for accomplices? Revolving this question in times past, I came to the
conclusion--that, perhaps, this colossal project of a war against war,
had been first put in motion under a misconception (natural enough, and
countenanced by innumerable books) as to the true historical origin
of wars in many notorious instances. If these had arisen on trivial
impulses, a trivial resistance might have intercepted them. If a man has
once persuaded himself, that long, costly, and bloody wars had arisen
upon a point of ceremony, upon a personal pique, upon a hasty word, upon
some explosion of momentary caprice; it is a natural inference, that
strength of national will and public combinations for resistance,
supposing such forces to have been trained, organized, and, from the
circumstances of the particular nation, to be permanently disposable for
action, might prove redundantly effective, when pointed against a few
personal authors of war, so presumably weak, and so flexible to any
stern counter-volition as those _must_ be supposed, whose wars argued
so much of vicious levity. The inference is unexceptionable: it is the
premises that are unsound. Anecdotes of war as having emanated from a
lady's tea-table or toilette, would authorize such inference as to the
facilities of controlling them. But the anecdotes themselves are false,
or false substantially. _All_ anecdotes, I fear, are false. I am sorry
to say so, but my duty to the reader extorts from me the disagreeable
confession, as upon a matter specially investigated by myself, that all
dealers in anecdotes are tainted with mendacity. Where is the Scotchman,
said Dr. Johnson, who does not prefer Scotland to truth? but, however
this may be, rarer than such a Scotchman, rarer than the phoenix, is
that virtuous man, a monster he is, nay, he is an impossible man, who
will consent to lose a prosperous anecdote on the consideration that
it happens to be a lie. All history, therefore, being built partly, and
some of it altogether, upon anecdotage, must be a tissue of lies. Such,
for the most part, is the history of Suetonius, who may be esteemed the
father of anecdotage; and being such, he (and not Herodotus) should
have been honored with the title, _Father of Lies_. Such is the Augustan
history, which is all that remains of the Roman empire; such is the vast
series of French memoirs, now stretching through more than three entire
centuries. Are these works, then, to be held cheap, because their truths
to their falsehoods are in the ratio of one to five hundred? On the
contrary, they are better, and more to be esteemed on that account;
because, _now_ they are admirable reading on a winter's night; whereas,
written on the principle of sticking to the truth, they would have been
as dull as ditch water. Generally, therefore, the dealers in anecdotage
are to be viewed with admiration, as patriotic citizens, willing to
sacrifice their own characters, lest their countrymen should find
themselves short of amusement. I esteem them as equal to Codrus,
Timoleon, William Tell, or to Milton, as regards the liberty of
unlicensed printing. And I object to them only in the exceptional case
of their being cited as authorities for an inference, or as vouchers
for a fact. Universally, it may be received as a rule of unlimited
application,--that when an anecdote involves a stinging repartee, or
collision of ideas, fancifully and brilliantly related to each other
by resemblance or contrast, then you may challenge it as false to
a certainty. One illustration of which is--that pretty nearly every
memorable _propos_, or pointed repartee, or striking _mot_, circulating
at this moment in Paris or London, as the undoubted property of
Talleyrand, (that eminent knave,) was ascribed at Vienna, ninety years
ago, to the Prince de Ligne, and thirty years previously, to Voltaire,
and so on, regressively, to many other wits (knaves or not); until, at
length, if you persist in backing far enough, you find yourself amongst
Pagans, with the very same repartee, &c., doing duty in pretty good
Greek; [Footnote: This is _literally_ true, more frequently than would
be supposed. For instance, a jest often ascribed to Voltaire, and of
late pointedly reclaimed for him by Lord Brougham, as being one that
he (Lord B.) could swear to for _his_, so characteristic seemed the
impression of Voltaire's mind upon the _tournure_ of the sarcasm,
unhappily for this waste of sagacity, may be found recorded by Fabricius
in the _Bibliotheca Græca_, as the jest of a Greek who has been dead for
about seventeen centuries. The man certainly _did_ utter the jest;
and 1750 years ago. But who it was that he stole it from is another
question. To all appearance, and according to Lord Brougham's opinion,
the party robbed must have been M. de Voltaire. I notice the case,
however, of the Greek thefts and frauds committed upon so many of our
excellent wits belonging to the 18th and 19th centuries, chiefly with a
view to M. de Talleyrand--that rather middling bishop, but very eminent
knave. He also has been extensively robbed by the Greeks of the 2d and
3d centuries. How else can you account for so many of his sayings being
found amongst _their_ pages? A thing you may ascertain in a moment, at
any police office, by having the Greeks searched: for surely you would
never think of searching a bishop. Most of the Talleyrand jewels will be
found concealed amongst the goods of these unprincipled Greeks. But one,
and the most famous in the whole jewel-case, sorry am I to confess,
was nearly stolen from the Bishop, not by any Greek, but by an English
writer, viz., Goldsmith, who must have been dying about the time that
his Excellency, the diplomatist, had the goodness to be born. That
famous _mot_ about language, as a gift made to man for the purpose of
_concealing_ his thoughts, is lurking in Goldsmith's Essays. Think of
_that!_ Already, in his innocent childhood, whilst the Bishop was in
petticoats, and almost before he had begun to curse and to swear plainly
in French, an Irish vagabond had attempted to swindle him out of that
famous witticism which has since been as good as a life-annuity to the
venerable knave's literary fame.] sometimes, for instance in Hierocles,
sometimes in Diogenes Lærtius, in Plutarch, or in Athenæus. Now the
thing you know claimed by so many people, could not belong to all of
them: _all_ of them could not be the inventors. Logic and common sense
unite in showing us that it must have belonged to the moderns, who had
clearly been hustled and robbed by the ancients, so much more
likely to commit a robbery than Christians, they being all
Gentiles--Pagans--Heathen dogs. What do I infer from this? Why, that
upon _any_ solution of the case, hardly one worthy saying can be
mentioned, hardly one jest, pun, or sarcasm, which has not been the
occasion and subject of many falsehoods--as having been _au-(and
men)-daciously_ transferred from generation to generation, sworn to in
every age as this man's property, or that man's, by people that must
have known they were lying, until you retire from the investigation with
a conviction, that under any system of chronology, the science of lying
is the only one that has never drooped. Date from _Anno Domini_, or
from the Julian era, patronize Olympiads, or patronize (as _I_ do, from
misanthropy, because nobody else _will_) the era of Nabonassar,--no
matter, upon every road, thicker than mile-stones, you see records
of human mendacity, or (which is much worse, in my opinion,) of human
sympathy with other people's mendacity.
This digression, now, on anecdotes,[Footnote: The word 'Anecdotes,'
first, I believe, came into currency about the middle of the 6th
century, from the use made of it by Procopius. _Literally_ it indicated
nothing that could interest either public malice or public favor; it
promised only _unpublished_ notices of the Emperor Justinian, his wife
Theodora, Narses, Belisarius, &c. But _why_ had they been unpublished?
Simply because scandalous and defamatory: and hence, from the interest
which invested the case of an imperial court so remarkable, this
oblique, secondary and purely accidental modification of the word came
to influence its _general_ acceptation. Simply to have been previously
unpublished, no longer raised any statement into an anecdote: it
now received a new integration it must be some fresh publication of
_personal_ memorabilia; and these having reference to _human_ creatures,
must always be presumed to involve more evil than good--much defamation
true or false--much doubtful insinuation--much suggestion of things
worse than could be openly affirmed. So arose the word: but the _thing_
arose with Suetonius, that dear, excellent and hard-working 'father of
lies.'] is what the learned call an _excursus_, and, I am afraid, too
long by half; not strictly in proportion. But don't mind _that_. I'll
make it all right by being too short upon something else, at the next
opportunity; and then nobody can complain. Meantime, I argue, that as
all brilliant or epigrammatic anecdotes are probably false, (a thing
that hereafter I shall have much pleasure in making out to the angry
reader's satisfaction,) but to a dead certainty those anecdotes, in
particular, which bear marks in their construction that a rhetorical
effect of art had been contemplated by the narrator,--we may take for
granted, that the current stories ascribing modern wars (French and
English) to accidents the most inconsiderable, are false even in
a literal sense; but at all events they are so when valued
philosophically, and brought out into their circumstantial relations.
For instance, we have a French anecdote, from the latter part of the
seventeenth century, which ascribes one bloody war to the accident of a
little 'miff,' arising between the king and his minister upon some such
trifle as the situation of a palace window. Again, from the early
part of the eighteenth century, we have an English anecdote, ascribing
consequences no less bloody to a sudden feud between two ladies, and
that feud, (if I remember,) tracing itself up to a pair of gloves;
so that, in effect, the war and the gloves form the two poles of
the transaction. Harlequin throws a pair of Limerick gloves into a
corn-mill; and the spectator is astonished to see the gloves immediately
issuing from the hopper, well ground into seven armies of one hundred
thousand men each, and with parks of artillery to correspond. In these
two anecdotes, we recognize at once the able and industrious artist
arranging his materials with a pious regard to theatrical effect. This
man knows how to group his figures; well he understands where to plant
his masses of light and shade; and what impertinence it would be in us
spectators, the reader suppose and myself, to go behind the scenes for
critical inquiry into daylight realities. All reasonable men see that,
the less of such realities our artist had to work with, the more was his
merit. I am one of those that detest all insidious attempts to rob
men situated as this artist of their fair fame, by going about and
whispering that perhaps the thing is true. Far from it! I sympathize
with the poor trembling artist, and agree most cordially that the whole
story is a lie; and he may rely upon my support at all times to
the extent of denying that any vestige of truth probably lay at the
foundations of his ingenious apologue. And what I say of the English
fable, I am willing to say of the French one. Both, I dare say, were the
rankest fictions. But next, what, after all, if they were _not?_ For, in
the rear of all discussion upon anecdotes, considered simply as true
or _not_ true, comes finally a _valuation_ of those anecdotes in their
moral relation, and as to the inferences which they will sustain. The
story, for example, of the French minister Louvois, and the adroitness
with which he fastened upon great foreign potentates, in the shape of
war, that irritability of temper in his royal master which threatened
to consume himself; the diplomatic address with which he transmuted
suddenly a task so delicate as that of skirmishing daily in a
Council Chamber with his own sovereign, into that far jollier mode of
disputation where one replies to all objections of the very keenest
logician, either with round shot or with grape; here is an anecdote,
which (for my own part) I am inclined to view as pure gasconade. But
suppose the story true, still it may happen that a better valuation
of it may disturb the whole edifice of logical inferences by which it
seemed to favor the speculations of the war abolitionists. Let us see.
What _was_ the logic through which such a tale as this could lend any
countenance to the schemes of these abolitionists? That logic travelled
in the following channel. Such a tale, or the English tale of the
gloves, being supposed true, it would seem to follow, that war and the
purposes of war were phenomena of chance growth, not attached to any
instinct so ancient, and apparently so grooved into the dark necessities
of our nature, as we had all taken for granted. Usually, we rank war
with hunger, with cold, with sorrow, with death, afflictions of our
human state that spring up as inevitably without separate culture and
in defiance of all hostile culture, as verdure, as weeds, and as flowers
that overspread in spring time a fertile soil without needing to be
sown or watered--awful is the necessity, as it seems, of all such
afflictions. Yet, again, if (as these anecdote simply) war could by
possibility depend frequently on accidents of personal temperament,
irritability in a sensual king, wounded sensibilities of pride between
two sensitive ladies, there in a moment shone forth a light of hope upon
the crusade against war.
If _personal_ accidents could, to any serious extent, be amongst the
causes of war, then it would become a hopeful duty to combine personal
influences that should take an opposite direction. If casual causes
could be supposed chiefly to have promoted war, how easy for a nation to
arrange permanent and determinate causes against it! The logic of these
anecdotes seemed to argue that the whole fountains of war were left to
the government of chance and the windiest of levities; that war was not
in reality roused into activity by the evil that resides in the human
will, but on the contrary, by the simple defect of any will energetic
enough or steady enough to merit that name. Multitudes of evils exist in
our social system, simply because no steadiness of attention, nor action
of combined will, has been converged upon them. War, by the silent
evidence of these anecdotes, seemed to lie amongst that class of evils.
A new era might be expected to commence in new views upon war; and the
evil would be half conquered from the moment that it should be traced to
a trivial or a personal origin.
All this was plausible, but false. The anecdotes, and all similar
anecdotes, might be true, but were delusive. The logical vice in them
was--that they substituted an occasion for a cause. The king's ill
temper for instance, acting through the levity and impatience of the
minister, might be the _causa occasionalis_ of the war, but not its true
_causa efficiens_. What _was?_ Where do the true permanent causes
of war, as distinguished from its proximate excitements, find their
lodgment and abiding ground? They lie in the system of national
competitions; in the common political system to which all individual
nations are unavoidably parties; in the system of public forces
distributed amongst a number of adjacent nations, with no internal
principle for adjusting the equilibrium of these forces, and no supreme
_Areopagus_, or court of appeal, for deciding disputes. Here lies the
_matrix_ of war, because an eternal _matrix_ of disputes lies in a
system of interests that are continually the same, and therefore the
parents of rivalships too close, that are continually different, and
so far the parents of alienation too wide. All war is an instinctive
_nisus_ for redressing the errors of equilibrium in the relative
position of nations amongst nations. Every nation's duty, first, midst,
and last, is to itself. No nation can be safe from continual (because
insensible) losses of ground, but by continual jealousies, watchings,
and ambitious strivings to mend its own position. Civilities and
high-bred courtesies pass and ought to pass between nations; that is
the graceful drapery which shrouds their natural, fierce, and tiger-like
relations to each other. But the glaring eyes, which express this
deep and inalienable ferocity, look out at intervals from below these
gorgeous draperies; and sad it is to think that at intervals the acts
and the temper suitable to those glaring eyes _must_ come forward. Mr.
Carter was on terms of the most exquisite dissimulation with his lions
and tigers; but, as often as he trusted his person amongst them, if,
in the midst of infinite politeness exchanged on all sides, he saw a
certain portentous expression of mutiny kindling in the eyeball of any
discontented tiger, all was lost, unless he came down instantly
upon that tiger's skull with a blow from an iron bar, that suggested
something like apoplexy. On such terms do nations meet in diplomacy;
high consideration for each other does not conceal the basis of enmity
on which they rest; not an enmity that belongs to their feelings, but to
the necessities of their position. Every nation in negotiating has
its right hand upon the hilt of its sword, and at intervals playfully
unsheaths a little of its gleaming blade. As things stand at present,
war and peace are bound together like the vicissitudes of day and night,
of Castor and Pollux. It matters little which bucket of the two is
going up at the moment, which going down. Both are steadfastly tied by a
system of alternations to a revolving wheel; and a new war as certainly
becomes due during the evolutions of a tedious peace, as a new peace
may be relied on during the throes of a bloody war, to tranquillize its
wounds. Consequently, when the arrogant Louvois carried a war to the
credit of his own little account on the national leger of France,
this coxcomb well knew that a war was at any rate due about that
time. Really, says he, I must find out some little war to exhaust the
_surplus_ irritability of this person, or he'll be the death of me. But
irritable or not irritable, with a puppy for his minister or not, the
French king would naturally have been carried headlong into war by the
mere system of Europe, within a very few months. So much had the causes
of complaint reciprocally accumulated. The account must be cleansed, the
court roll of grievances must be purged. With respect to the two English
ladies again, it is still more evident that they could not have _caused_
a war by pulling caps with each other, since the grounds of every war,
what had caused it, and prolonged it, was sure to be angrily reviewed by
Parliament at each annual exposition of the Finance Minister's Budget.
These ladies, and the French coxcomb, could at the utmost have claimed a
distinction--such as that which belonged to a particular Turkish gunner,
the captain of a gun at Navarino, viz., that he, by firing the first
shot without orders, did (as a matter of fact) let loose and unmuzzle
the whole of that dreadful iron hurricane from four nations which
instantly followed, but which (be it known to the gunner) could not
have been delayed for fifty minutes longer, whether he had fired the
unauthorized gun or not.
But now, let me speak to the second proposition of my two-headed thesis,
viz., that war _ought_ not to be abolished, if such an abolition were
even possible. _Prima facie_, it seems a dreadful doctrine to claim
a place for war as amongst the evils that are salutary to man; but
conscientiously I hold it to be such. I hold with Wordsworth, but
for reasons which may or may not be the same, since he has not stated
_his_--
'That God's most dreaded instrument,
In working out a pure intent,
Is man--array'd for mutual slaughter:
Yea, Carnage is his daughter.'
I am obliged to hold, that supposing so romantic a condition realized
as the cessation of war, this change, unless other evils were previously
abolished, or neutralized in a way still more romantic to suppose, would
not be for the welfare of human nature, but would tend to its rapid
degradation.
One, in fact, of the earliest aspects under which this moral necessity
for war forces itself upon our notice, is its physical necessity. I mean
to say that one of the earliest reasons why war _ought_ to exist, is
because under any mode of suppressing war, virtually it _will_ exist.
Banish war as now administered, and it will revolve upon us in a worse
shape, that is, in a shape of predatory and ruffian war, more and more
licentious, as it enjoys no privilege or sufferance, by the supposition,
under the national laws. Will the causes of war die away because war is
forbidden? Certainly not; and the only result of the prohibition would
be to throw back the exercise of war from national into private and
mercenary hands; and _that_ is precisely the retrograde or inverse
course of civilization; for, in the natural order of civilization, war
passes from the hands of knights, barons, insulated cities, into those
of the universal community. If, again, it is attempted to put down this
lawless _guerilla_ state by national forces, then the result will be to
have established an interminable warfare of a mixed character, private
and public, civil and foreign, infesting the frontiers of all states
like a fever, and in substitution for the occasional and intermitting
wars of high national police, administered with the dignified
responsibility that belongs to supreme rank, with the humanity that
belongs to conscious power, and with the diminishing havoc that belongs
to increasing skill in the arts of destruction. Even as to this last
feature in warfare, which in the war of brigands and _condottieri_ would
for many reasons instantly decay, no reader can fail to be aware of the
marvels effected by the forces of inventive science that run along
side by side with the advances of civilization; look back even to the
grandest period of the humane Roman warfare, listen to the noblest and
most merciful of all Roman captains, saying on the day of Pharsalia,
(and saying of necessity,) 'Strike at their faces, cavalry,'--yes,
absolutely directing his own troopers to plough up with their sabres the
blooming faces of the young Roman nobility; and then pass to a modern
field of battle, where all is finished by musquetry and artillery amidst
clouds of smoke, no soldier recognizing his own desolations, or the
ghastly ruin of his own right arm, so that war, by losing all its
brutality, is losing half of its demoralization.
War, so far from ending, because war was forbidden and nationally
renounced, on the contrary would transmigrate into a more fearful
shape. As things are at present, (and, observe, they are always growing
better,) what numbers of noble-minded men, in the persons of our
officers (yes, and often of non-commissioned officers,) do we British,
for example, disperse over battle-fields, that could not dishonor their
glorious uniform by any countenance to an act of cruelty! They are eyes
delegated from the charities of our domestic life, to overlook and
curb the license of war. I remember, in Xenophon, some passage where
he describes a class of Persian gentlemen, who were called the
_ophthalmoi_, or _eyes_ of the king; but for a very different purpose.
These British officers may be called the _opthalmoi_, or eyes of
our Sovereign Lady, that into every corner of the battle carry their
scrutiny, lest any cruelty should be committed on the helpless, or any
advantage taken of a dying enemy. But mark, such officers would be rare
in the irregular troops succeeding to the official armies. And through
this channel, amongst others, war, when cried down by act of Parliament,
and precisely _because_ it was cried down, would become more perilously
effective for the degradation of human nature. Being itself dishonored,
war would become the more effective as an instrument for the dishonoring
of its agents. However, at length, we will suppose the impossible
problem solved--war, we will assume, is at last put down.
At length there is no more war. Though by the way, let me whisper in
your ear, (supposing you to be a Christian,) this would be a prelibation
drawn prematurely from the cup of millennial happiness; and, strictly
speaking, there is no great homage to religion, even thus far--in
figuring _that_ to be the purchase of man for himself, and through his
own efforts, which is viewed by Scripture as a glory removed to the
infinite and starry distance of a millennium, and as the _teleutaion
epigeinaema_, the last crowning attainment of Christian truth, no
longer _militant_ on earth. Christianity it is, but Christianity when
_triumphant_, and no longer in conflict with adverse, or thwarting, or
limiting influences, which only can be equal to a revolution so mighty.
But all this, for the sake of pursuing the assumption, let us agree to
waive. In reality, there are two separate stations taken up by the war
denouncers. One class hold, that an influence derived from political
economy is quite equal to the flying leap by which man is to clear this
unfathomable gulph of war, and to land his race for ever on the opposite
shore of a self-sustaining peace. Simply, the contemplation of national
debts, (as a burthen which never would have existed without war,) and
a computation of the waste, havoc, unproductive labor, &c., attached to
any single campaign--these, they imagine, might suffice, _per se_,
for the extinction of war. But the other class cannot go along with
a speculation so infirm. Reasons there are, in the opposite scale,
tempting man into war,--which are far mightier than any motives
addressed to his self-interest. Even straining her energies to the
utmost, they regard all policy of the _purse_ as adequate: anything
short of religion, they are satisfied, must be incommensurate to a
result so vast.
I myself certainly agree with this last class; but upon this arises
a delusion, which I shall have some trouble in making the reader
understand: and of this I am confident-that a majority, perhaps, in
every given amount of readers, will share in the delusion; will part
from me in the persuasion that the error I attempt to expose is no error
at all, but that it is myself who am in the wrong. The delusion which
I challenge as such, respects the very meaning and value of a sacrifice
made to Christianity. What is it? what do we properly mean, by
a concession or a sacrifice made to a spiritual power, such as
Christianity? If a king and his people, impressed by the unchristian
character of war, were to say, in some solemn act--'We, the parties
undersigned, for the reasons stated in the body of this document,
proclaim to all nations, that from and after Midsummer eve of the year
1850, this being the eve of St. John the Baptist, (who was the herald of
Christ,) we will no more prosecute any interest of ours, unless the one
sole interest of national defence, by means of war,--and this sacrifice
we make as a concession and act of homage to Christianity,--would
_that_ vow, I ask, sincerely offered, and steadily observed, really be a
sacrifice made to Christianity? Not at all. A sacrifice, that was truly
such, to a spiritual religion, must be a sacrifice not verbally (though
sincerely) dedicating itself to the religion, but a sacrifice wrought
and accomplished by that religion, through and by its own spirit.
Midsummer eve of 1850 could clearly make no spiritual change in the king
or his people--such they would be on the morning after St. John's day,
as on the morning before it--_i. e._, filled with all elements (though
possibly undeveloped) of strife, feud, pernicious ambition.
The delusion, therefore, which I charge upon this religious class of
war denouncers is, that whilst they see and recognize this infinite
imperfection of any influence which Christianity yet exercises upon
the world, they nevertheless rely upon that acknowledged shadow for the
accomplishment of what would, in such circumstances, be a real miracle;
they rely upon that shadow, as truly and entirely as if it were already
that substance which, in a vast revolution of ages, it will finally
become. And they rely upon this mockery in _two_ senses; first, for the
_endurance_ of the frail human resolution that would thaw in an hour
before a great outrage, or provocation suited to the nobler infirmities
of man. Secondly, which is the point I mainly aim at, assuming, for a
moment, that the resolution _could_ endure, amongst all mankind, we are
all equally convinced, that an evil so vast is not likely to be checked
or controlled, except by some very extraordinary power. Well, where
_is_ it? Show me that power. I know of none but Christianity. _There_,
undoubtedly, is hope. But, in order that the hope may become rational,
the power must become practical. And practical it is not in the extent
required, until this Christianity, from being dimly appreciated by a
section [Footnote _What_ section, if you please? I, for my part, do not
agree with those that geographically degrade Christianity as occupying
but a trifle on the area of our earth. Mark this; all Eastern
populations have dwindled upon better acquaintance. Persia that _ought_
to have, at least, two hundred and fifty millions of people, and _would_
have them under English government, and once was supposed to have at
least one hundred millions, how many millions has she? _Eight!_ This
was ascertained by Napoleon's emissary in 1808, General Gardanne.
Afghanistan has very little more, though some falsely count fourteen
millions. There go two vast chambers of Mahometanism; not twenty
millions between them. Hindostan may _really_ have one hundred and
twenty millions claimed for her. As to the Burman Empire, I, nor anybody
else knows the truth. But, as to China, I have never for a moment been
moved by those ridiculous estimates of the flowery people, which our
simple countrymen copy. Instead of three hundred and fifty millions, a
third of the human race upon the most exaggerated estimate, read eighty
or one hundred millions at most. Africa, as it regards religion, counts
for a cipher. Europe, America, and the half of Asia, as to space, are
Christian. Consequently, the total _facit_, as regards Christianity, is
not what many amiable infidels make it to be. My dears, your wish was
father to that thought.] of this world, shall have been the law that
overrides the whole. That consummation is not immeasurably distant. Even
now, from considerations connected with China, with New Zealand, Borneo,
Australia, we may say, that already the fields are white for harvest.
But alas! the interval is brief between Christianity small, and
Christianity great, as regards space or terraqueous importance, compared
with that interval which separates Christianity formally professed,
from Christianity thankfully acknowledged by universal man in beauty and
power.
Here, therefore, is one spoke in the wheel for so vast a change as war
dethroned, viz., that you see no cause, though you should travel round
the whole horizon, adequate to so prodigious an effect. What could
do it? Why, Christianity could do it. Aye, true; but man disarms
Christianity. And no mock Christianity, no lip homage to Christianity,
will answer.
But is war, then, to go on for ever? Are we never to improve? Are
nations to conduct their intercourse eternally under the secret
understanding that an unchristian solution of all irreconcileable feuds
stands in the rear as the ultimate appeal? I answer that war, going on
even for ever, may still be for ever amending its modes and its results
upon human happiness; secondly, that we not only are under no fatal
arrest in our process of improvement, but that, as regards war, history
shows how steadily we _have_ been improving; and, thirdly, that although
war may be irreversible as the last resource, this last resource may
constantly be retiring further into the rear. Let us speak to this
last point. War is the last resource only, because other and more
intellectual resources for solving disputes are not available. And
_why_ are they not? Simply, because the knowledge, and the logic, which
ultimately will govern the case, and the very circumstances of the case
itself in its details, as the basis on which this knowledge and logic
are to operate, happen not to have been sufficiently developed. A code
of law is not a spasmodic effort of gigantic talent in any one man
or any one generation; it is a slow growth of accidents and occasions
expanding with civilization; dependent upon time as a multiform element
in its development; and presupposing often a concurrent growth of
_analogous_ cases towards the completion of its system. For instance,
the law which regulates the rights of shipping, seafaring men, and
maritime commerce--how slow was its development! Before such works as
the _Consolato del Mare_ had been matured, how wide must have been the
experience, and how slow its accumulation! During that long period of
infancy for law, how many must have been the openings for ignorant
and unintentional injustice! How differently, again, will the several
parties to any transaction construe the rights of the case! Discussion,
without rules for guiding it, will but embitter the dispute. And in the
absence of all guidance from the intellect, gradually weaving a _common_
standard of international appeal, it is clear that nations _must_ fight,
and _ought_ to fight. Not being convinced, it is base to pretend that
you _are_ convinced; and failing to be convinced by your neighbor's
arguments, you confess yourself a poltroon (and moreover you _invite_
injuries from every neighbor) if you pocket your wrongs. The only course
in such a case is to thump your neighbor, and to thump him soundly
for the present. This treatment is very serviceable to your neighbor's
optics; he sees things in a new light after a sufficient course of so
distressing a regimen. But mark, even in this case, war has no tendency
to propagate war, but tends to the very opposite result. To thump is as
costly, and in other ways as painful, as to _be_ thumped. The evil to
both sides arises in an undeveloped state of law. If rights were defined
by a well considered code growing out of long experience, each party
sees that this scourge of war would continually tend to limit itself.
Consequently the very necessity of war becomes the strongest invitation
to that system of judicial logic which forms its sole limitation. But
all war whatsoever stands in these circumstances. It follows that all
war whatever, unless on the brutal principle of a Spartan warfare, that
made war its own sufficient object and self-justification, operates as
a perpetual bounty offered to men upon the investigation and final
adjudication of those disputed cases through which war prospers. Hence
it is, viz., because the true boundaries of reciprocal rights are for
ever ascertaining themselves more clearly, that war is growing less
frequent. The fields open to injustice (which originally from pure
ignorance are so vast) continually (through deeper and more expansive
surveys by man's intellect--searching--reflecting--comparing) are
narrowing themselves; narrowing themselves in this sense, that all
nations under a common centre of religious civilization, as Christendom
suppose, or Islamism, would not fight--no, and would not (by the
national sense of wrong and right) be permitted to fight--in a cause
_confessedly_ condemned by equity as now developed. The causes of war
that still remain, are causes on which international law is silent--that
large arrear of cases as yet unsettled; or else they are cases in which
though law speaks with an authentic voice, it speaks in vain, because
the circumstances are doubtful; so that, if the law is fixed as a lamp
nailed to a wall, yet the _incidence_ of the law on the particular
circumstances, becomes as doubtful as the light of the lamp upon objects
that are capriciously moving. We see all this illustrated in a class of
cases that powerfully illustrate the good and the bad in war, the why
and the wherefore, as likewise the why _not_, and therefore I presume
the wherefore _not_; and this class of cases belongs to the _lex
vicinitatis_. In the Roman law this section makes a great figure. And
speaking accurately, it makes a greater in our own. But the reason why
this _law of neighborhood_ seems to fill so much smaller a section in
ours, is because in English law, being _positively_ a longer section,
_negatively_ to the whole compass of our law, it is less. The Roman law
would have paved a road to the moon. And what is _that_ expressed in
time? Let us see: a railway train, worked at the speed of the Great
Western Express, accomplishes easily a thousand miles in twenty-four
hours; consequently in two hundred and forty days or eight months it
would run into the moon with its buffers, and break up the quarters of
that Robinson Crusoe who (and without any Friday) is the only policeman
that parades that little pensive appendage or tender to our fuming
engine of an earth. But the English law--oh frightful reader, don't even
think of such a question as its relation in space and time to the Roman
law. That it would stretch to the fixed stars is plain, but to which
of them,--don't now, dear persecuting reader, unsettle our brains by
asking. Enough it is that both in Roman and English law the rights of
neighborhood are past measuring. Has a man a right to play the German
flute, where the partitions are slender, all day long in the house
adjoining to yours? Or, supposing a beneficent jury (beneficent to
_him_) finds this to be no legal nuisance, has he a right to play it
ill? Or, because juries, when tipsy, will wink at anything, does the
privilege extend to the jew's-harp? to the poker and tongs? to the
marrowbones and cleavers? Or, without ranging through the whole of the
_Spectator's_ culinary music, will the bagpipes be found within benefit
of jury law? _War to the knife_ I say, before we'll submit to _that_.
And if the law won't protect us against it, then we'll turn rebels.
Now this law of neighborhood, this _lex vicinitatis_, amongst the
Romans, righted itself and settled itself, as amongst ourselves it
continues to do, by means of actions or legal suits. If a man poisons us
with smoke, we compel him by an action to eat his own smoke, or (if he
chooses) to make his chimneys eat it. Here you see is a transmuted war;
in a barbarous state, fire and sword would have avenged this invasion of
smoke; but amongst civilized men, paper bullets in the form of _Qui
tam_ and _Scire facias_, beat off the enemy. And on the same principle,
exactly as the law of international rights clears up its dark places,
war gradually narrows its grounds, and the _jus gentium_ defines itself
through national attorneys, _i. e._, diplomatists.
For instance, now I have myself seen a case where a man cultivating a
flower-garden, and distressed for some deliverance from his rubbish of
dead leaves, litter, straw, stones, took the desperate resolution of
projecting the whole upon his neighbor's flower-garden. I, a chance
spectator of the outrage, knew too much of this world to lodge any
protest against it, on the principle of mere abstract justice; so it
would have passed unnoticed, but for the accident that his injured
neighbor unexpectedly raised up his head above the dividing wall, and
reproached the aggressor with his unprincipled conduct. This aggressor,
adding evil to evil, suggested as the natural remedy for his own wrong,
that the sufferer should pass the nuisance onwards to the garden next
beyond him; from which it might be posted forward on the same principle.
The aggrieved man, however, preferred passing it back, without any
discount to the original proprietor. Here now, is a ripe case, a _causa
teterrima_, for war between the parties, and for a national war had
the parties been nations. In fact, the very same injury, in a more
aggravated shape, is perpetrated from time to time by Jersey upon
ourselves, and would, upon a larger scale, right itself by war. Convicts
are costly to maintain; and Jersey, whose national revenue is limited,
being too well aware of this, does us the favor to land upon the coasts
of Hampshire, Dorset, &c., all the criminals whom she cannot summarily
send back to self-support, at each jail-delivery. 'What are we to do in
England?' is the natural question propounded by the injured scoundrels,
when taking leave of their Jersey escort. 'Anything you please,' is
the answer: 'rise if you can, to be dukes: only never come back hither;
since, dukes or _no_ dukes, to the rest of Christendom, to _us_ of
the Channel Islands you will always be transported felons.' There is
therefore a good right of action, _i.e._, a good ground of war, against
Jersey, on the part of Great Britain, since, besides the atrocious
injury inflicted, this unprincipled little island has the audacity to
regard our England, (all Europe looking on,) as existing only for the
purposes of a sewer or cess-pool to receive _her_ impurities. Some time
back I remember a Scottish newspaper holding up the case as a newly
discovered horror in the social system. But, in a quiet way Jersey has
always been engaged in this branch of exportation, and rarely fails to
'run' a cargo of rogues upon our shore, once or so in the season. What
amuses one besides, in this Scottish denunciation of the villany, is,
that Scotland [Footnote: To banish them 'forth of the kingdom,' was the
_euphuismus_; but the reality understood was--to carry the knaves, like
foxes in a bag, to the English soil, and there unbag them for English
use.] of old, pursued the very same mode of jail-delivery as to knaves
that were not thought ripe enough for hanging: she carted them to
the English border, unchained them, and hurried them adrift into the
wilderness, saying--Now, boys, shift for yourselves, and henceforth
plunder none but Englishmen.
What I deduce from all this is, that as the feuds arising between
individuals under the relation of neighbors, are so far from tending to
a hostile result, that, on the contrary, as coming under a rule of
law already ascertained, or furnishing the basis for a new rule, they
gradually tighten the cords which exclude all opening for quarrel; not
otherwise is the result, and therefore the usefulness, of war amongst
nations. All the causes of war, the occasions upon which it is likely to
arise, the true and the ostensible motives, are gradually evolved, are
examined, searched, valued, by publicists; and by such means, in the
further progress of men, a comprehensive law of nations will finally be
accumulated, not such as now passes for international law, (a worthless
code that _has_ no weight in the practice of nations, nor deserves any,)
but one which will exhaust the great body of cases under which wars have
arisen under the Christian era, and gradually collect a public opinion
of Christendom upon the nature of each particular case. The causes that
_have_ existed for war are the causes that _will_ exist; or, at least,
they are the same under modifications that will simply vary the rule,
as our law cases in the courts are every day circumstantiating the
particular statute concerned. At this stage of advance, and when a true
European opinion has been created, a '_sensus communis_,' or community
of feeling on the main classifications of wars, it will become possible
to erect a real Areopagus, or central congress for all Christendom, not
with any commission to suppress wars,--a policy which would neutralize
itself by reacting as a fresh cause of war, since high-spirited nations
would arm for the purpose of resisting such decrees; but with the
purpose and the effect of oftentimes healing local or momentary
animosities, and also by publishing the opinion of Europe, assembled in
council, with the effect of taking away the shadow of dishonor from the
act of retiring from war. Not to mention that the mere delay, involved
in the waiting for the solemn opinion of congress, would always be
friendly to pacific councils. But _would_ the belligerents wait? That
concession might be secured by general exchange of treaties, in the
same way that the cooperation of so many nations has been secured to the
suppression of the trade in slaves. And one thing is clear, that when
all the causes of war, involving _manifest_ injustice, are banished by
the force of European opinion, focally converged upon the subject, the
range of war will be prodigiously circumscribed. The costliness of war,
which, for various reasons has been continually increasing since the
feudal period, will operate as another limitation upon its field,
concurring powerfully with the public declaration from a council of
collective Christendom.
There is, besides, a distinct and separate cause of war, more fatal to
the possibilities of peace in Europe than open injustice; and this cause
being certainly in the hands of nations to deal with as they please,
there is a tolerable certainty that a congress _sincerely_ pacific would
cut it up by the roots. It is a cause noticed by Kant in his Essay on
Perpetual Peace, and with great sagacity, though otherwise that little
work is not free from visionary self-delusions: and this cause lies in
the diplomacy of Europe. Treaties of peace are so constructed, as almost
always to sow the seeds of future wars. This seems to the inexperienced
reader a matter of carelessness or laxity in the choice of expression;
and sometimes it may have been so; but more often it has been done under
the secret dictation of powerful courts--making peaces only as truces,
anxious only for time to nurse their energies, and to keep open some
plausible call for war. This is not only amongst the most extensive
causes of war, but the very worst: because it gives a colorable air of
justice, and almost of necessity to a war, which is, in fact, the most
outrageously unjust, as being derived from a pretext silently prepared
in former years, with mere subtlety of malice: it is a war growing out
of occasions, forged beforehand, lest no occasions should spontaneously
arise. Now, this cause of war could and would be healed by a congress,
and through an easy reform in European diplomacy.[Footnote: One great
_nidus_ of this insidious preparation for war under the very masque of
peace, which Kant, from brevity, has failed to particularize, lies in
the neglecting to make any provision for cases that are likely enough to
arise. A, B, C, D, are all equally possible, but the treaty provides a
specific course of action only for A, suppose. Then upon B or C arising,
the high contracting parties, though desperately and equally pacific,
find themselves committed to war actually by a treaty of lasting peace.
Their pacific majesties sigh, and say--Alas! that it should be so, but
really fight we must, for what says the treaty?]
It is the strongest confirmation of the power inherent in growing
civilization, to amend war, and to narrow the field of war, if we look
back for the records of the changes in this direction which have already
arisen in generations before our own.
The most careless reviewer of history can hardly fail to read a rude
outline of progress made by men in the rights, and consequently in the
duties of war through the last twenty-five centuries. It is a happy
circumstance for man--that oftentimes he is led by pure selfishness into
reforms, the very same as high principle would have prompted; and in the
next stage of his advance, when once habituated to an improved code of
usages, he begins to find a gratification to his sensibilities, (partly
luxurious sensibilities, but partly moral,) in what originally had been
a mere movement of self-interest. Then comes a third stage, in which
having thoroughly reconciled himself to a better order of things, and
made it even necessary to his own comfort, at length he begins in
his reflecting moments to perceive a moral beauty and a fitness in
arrangements that had emanated from accidents of convenience, so that
finally he generates a sublime pleasure of conscientiousness out of
that which originally commenced in the meanest forms of mercenary
convenience. A Roman lady of rank, out of mere voluptuous regard to her
own comfort, revolted from the harsh clamors of eternal chastisements
inflicted on her numerous slaves; she forbade them; the grateful slaves
showed their love for her; gradually and unintentionally she trained
her feelings, when thus liberated from a continual temptation to the
sympathies with cruelty, into a demand for gentler and purer excitement.
Her purpose had been one of luxury; but, by the benignity of nature
still watching for ennobling opportunities, the actual result was a
development given to the higher capacities of her heart. In the same
way, when the brutal right (and in many circumstances the brutal duty)
of inflicting death upon prisoners taken in battle, had exchanged
itself for the profits of ransom or slavery, this relaxation of ferocity
(though commencing in selfishness) gradually exalted itself into a habit
of mildness, and some dim perception of a sanctity in human life. The
very vice of avarice ministered to the purification of barbarism;
and the very evil of slavery in its earliest form was applied to the
mitigation of another evil--war conducted in the spirit of piratical
outrage. The commercial instincts of men having worked one set of
changes in war, a second set of changes was prompted by instincts
derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms, of
banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of
intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of
peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with
modes of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of
superstition or scrupulous religion,--a permanent light of civilization
began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other
modes of harmonizing influences arose more directly from the bosom of
war itself. Gradually the mere practice of war, and the culture of
war though merely viewed as a rude trade of bloodshed, ripened into an
intellectual art. Were it merely with a view to more effectual carnage,
this art (however simple and gross at first) opened at length into wide
scientific arts, into strategies, into tactics, into castrametation,
into poliorcetics, and all the processes through which the first rude
efforts of martial cunning finally connect themselves with the exquisite
resources of science. War, being a game in which each side forces the
other into the instant adoption of all improvements through the mere
necessities of self-preservation, became continually more intellectual.
It is interesting to observe the steps by which, were it only through
impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more
effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid
trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science. Starting
from no higher impulse or question than how to cut throats most rapidly,
most safely, and on the largest scale, it has issued even at our own
stage of advance into a science, magnificent, oftentimes ennobling, and
cleansed from all horrors except those which (not being within man's
power utterly to divorce from it) no longer stand out as reproaches to
his humanity.
Meantime a more circumstantial review of war, in relation to its motives
and the causes assigned for its justification, would expose a series
of changes greater perhaps than the reader is aware of. Such a review,
which would too much lengthen a single paper, may or may not form the
subject of a second. And I will content myself with saying, as a closing
remark, that this review will detect a principle of steady advance in
the purification and elevation of war--such as must offer hope to those
who believe in the possibility of its absolute extermination, and must
offer consolation to those who (like myself) deny it.