Want of inquiry
It would not, perhaps, be affectation to say that of the reasons why we so readily engage in war, one of the principal is that we do not inquire into the subject.
We have been accustomed, from earliest life, to a familiarity with all its “pomp and circumstance”; soldiers have passed us at every step, and battles and victories have been the topic of everyone around us.
War, therefore, becomes familiarized to all our thoughts, and interwoven with all our associations. We have never inquired whether these things should be – the question does not even suggest itself.
We acquiesce in it, as we acquiesce in the rising of the sun, without any other idea than that it is a part of the ordinary process of the world.
And how are we to feel disapprobation of a system that we do not examine, and of the nature of which we do not think?
Want of inquiry has been the means by which long continued practices, whatever has been their enormity, have obtained the general concurrence of the world,
and by which they have continued to pollute or degrade it, long after the few who inquire into their nature have discovered them to be bad.
It was by these means that the slave trade was so long tolerated by this land of humanity:
Men did not think of its iniquity. We were induced to think, and we soon abhorred and then abolished it.
In the present moral state of the world, therefore, I believe it is the business of him who would perceive pure morality to question the purity of that which now obtains.
“The vices of another age,” says Robertson, “astonish and shock us; the vices of our own become familiar, and excite little horror…
The influence of any national custom on the understanding, on the heart, and on how far it may go towards perverting or extinguishing moral principles of the greatest importance, is remarkable.
They who (in 1566) had leisure to reflect and to judge, appear to be no more shocked at the crime of assassination than the persons who committed it in the heat and impetuosity of passion.”
250 years have added something to our morality:
We have learned, at least, to abhor assassination;
and I am not afraid to hope that the time will arrive when historians shall think of war what Robertson thinks of murder, and shall endeavour like him to account for the ferocity and moral blindness of their forefathers.
For, I do not think the influence of habit in the perversion or extinction of our moral principles is in any other thing so conspicuous or deplorable, as in the subject before us.
Those who are shocked at a single murder in the highway, hear with indifference of the murder of a thousand on the field.
Those to whom the idea of a single corpse would thrill with terror contemplate that of heaps of human carcasses, mangled by human hands, with frigid indifference.
If a murder is committed, the narrative is given in the public newspaper, with many expressions of commiseration, with many adjectives of horror, and with many hopes that the perpetrator will be detected.
In the next paragraph the editor, perhaps, tells us that he has hurried a second edition to the press in order that he may be the first to gladden the public with the intelligence that, in an engagement that has just taken place, 850 of the enemy were killed.
By war, the natural impulses of the heart seem to be suspended, as if a fiend of blood were privileged to exercise a spell upon our sensibilities, whenever we contemplated his ravages.
Among all the shocking and all the terrible scenes the world exhibits, the slaughters of war stand preeminent; yet these are the scenes of which the compassionate and the ferocious, the good and the bad, alike talk with complacency or exultation.
England is a land of benevolence, and to human misery she is of all nations, the most prompt in the extension of relief:
The immolations of the Hindus fill us with compassion or horror, and we are zealously labouring to prevent them.
The sacrifices of life by our own criminal executions are the subject of our anxious commiseration, and we are strenuously endeavouring to diminish their number.
We feel that the life of a Hindu or a malefactor is a serious thing, and that nothing but imperious necessity should induce us to destroy the one, or to permit the destruction of the other.
Yet what are these sacrifices of life in comparison with the sacrifices of war?
In the late campaign in Russia, there fell, during 173 days in succession, an average of 2900 men per day. More than 500 000 human beings in less than six months! And most of these victims expired with peculiar intensity of suffering.
“Thou that teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?”
We are carrying our benevolence to the Indies, but what becomes of it in Russia or at Leipzig? We are labouring to save a few lives from the gallows, but where is our solicitude to save them on the field of battle?
Life is life, wherever it may be sacrificed, and has everywhere equal claims to our regard.
I am not now inquiring whether war is right, but whether we do not regard its calamities with an indifference with which we regard no others,
and whether that indifference does not make us acquiesce in evils and in miseries which we should otherwise prevent or condemn.