The Effects of War | 3-1

1. Social consequences

There are few maxims of more unfailing truth than that “A tree is known by its fruits;”

and I will acknowledge that if the lawfulness of war were to be determined by a reference to its consequences, I should willingly consign it to this test, in the belief that if popular impressions were suspended, a good, benevolent, or reasoning man would find little cause to decide in its favour.

In attempting to illustrate some of the effects of war, it is my purpose to inquire not so much into its civil or political, as into its moral consequences; and of the latter, to notice those, chiefly, which commonly attract little of our inquiry or attention.

To speak strictly indeed, civil and political considerations are necessarily involved in the moral tendency,

for the happiness of society is always diminished by the diminution of morality, and enlightened policy knows that the greatest support of a state is the virtue of the people.

The reader needs not be reminded of – what nothing but the frequency of the calamity can make him forget – the intense sufferings and irreparable deprivations which a battle inevitably entails upon private life.

These are calamities of which the world thinks little, and which, if it thought of them, it could not remove:

A father or a husband can seldom be replaced; a void is created in the domestic felicity, which there is little hope that the future will fill.

By the slaughter of a, war, there are thousands who weep in unpitied and unnoticed secrecy, whom the world does not see; and thousands who retire, in silence, to hopeless poverty, for whom it does not care.

To these, the conquest of a kingdom is of little importance.

The loss of a protector or a friend is ill repaid by empty glory.

An addition of territory may add titles to a king, but the brilliancy of a crown throws little light upon domestic gloom.

It is not my intention to insist upon these calamities, intense, irreparable, and unnumbered as they are;

but those who begin a war without taking them into their estimates of its consequences must be regarded as, at most, half-seeing politicians.

The legitimate object of political measures is the good of the people, — and a war must produce a great sum of good if it outbalances even this portion of its mischiefs.

In the more obvious effects of war, there is, however, a sufficient sum of evil and wretchedness. The most dreadful of these is the destruction of human life.

The frequency with which this destruction is represented to our minds has almost extinguished our perception of its awfulness and horror.

In the interval between the years 1141 and 1815, England has been at war with France alone for 266 years.

If to this we add our wars with other countries, probably we shall find that one-half of the last six or seven centuries has been spent by this country in war! A dreadful picture of human violence!

There is no means of knowing how many victims have been sacrificed during this lapse of ages. Those who have fallen in battle, and those who have perished “in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction,” probably amount to a number greater than the number of men now existing in France and England together.

And where is our equivalent good?

The wars of Europe for the previous 200 years, by the confession of all parties, have really ended in the advantage of none, but to the manifest detriment of all.

- This is the testimony of the celebrated Dr. Josiah Tucker, Dean of Gloucester, and Erasmus has said,

I know not whether any war ever succeeded so fortunately in all its events, but that the conqueror, if he had a heart to feel or an understanding to judge as he ought to do, repented that he had ever engaged in it at all.