Causes of War | 1-5

Pecuniary interest

Wars are often promoted from considerations of interest, as well as from passion:

The love of gain adds its influence to our other motives to support them, and without other motives, we know that this love is sufficient to give great obliquity to the moral judgment, and to tempt us to many crimes.

During a war of 10 years, there will always be many whose income depends on its continuance; and a countless host of commissaries, and purveyors, and agents, and mechanics, commend a war, because it fills their pockets.

These men have commonly but one question respecting a war, and that is whether they profit from it. This is the standard of their decision, and this regulates the measure of their support.

If money is in prospect, the desolation of a kingdom is of little concern; destruction and slaughter are not to be put in competition with a larger pay-check.

In truth, it seems to be the system of those who conduct a war to give to the sources of gain every possible consideration:

The more there are who profit by it, the more numerous will be its supporters; and thus the wishes of the cabinet become united with the avarice of the people, and both are gratified in slaughter and devastation.

A support more systematic and powerful is, however, given to war, because it offers to the higher ranks of society a profession which unites gentility with profit, and which, without the vulgarity of trade, maintains or enriches them.

It is of little consequence to inquire whether the distinction of vulgarity between the toils of war and the toils of commerce is fictitious:

In the abstract, it is fictitious; but of this species of reputation public opinion holds the arbitrium, et jus, et norma – and public opinion is in favour of war.

The army and the navy therefore afford to the middle and higher classes a most acceptable profession. The profession of arms is like the professions of law or medicine – a regular source of employment and profit.

Boys are educated for the army like they are educated for the bar; and parents appear to have no other idea than that war is part of the business of the world.

Of younger sons, whose fathers do not choose to support them at the expense of the heir, the army and the navy are the common resource. They would not know what to do without them.

To many of these, the news of a peace becomes a calamity;

principle is not powerful enough to cope with interest; they prefer the desolation of the world to the loss of military rank.

It is in this manner that much of the rank, the influence, and the wealth of a country become interested in the promotion of wars; and when a custom is promoted by wealth, and influence, and rank, what is the wonder that it should be continued?

Yet it is a dreadful consideration that the destruction of our fellows should become a business by which to live; and that a man can find no other occupation of gain than that of butchering his neighbours.

It is said (if my memory serves me, by Sir Walter Raleigh), “He that takes up his rest to live by this profession, shall hardly be an honest man.

Where there is no obligation to obey,” says Lord Clarendon, “it is a wonderful and an unnatural appetite that disposes men to be soldiers, that they may know how to live;

and whatsoever reputation it may have in politics, it can have none in religion, to say that the art and conduct of a soldier is not infused by nature, but by study, experience, and observation;

and therefore that men are to learn it – when, in truth, this common argument is made by appetite to excuse, and not by reason to support, an ill custom.

People do not often become soldiers in order to serve their country, but to serve themselves; an income is commonly the motive to the great, and idleness to the poor.

To plead the love of our country is therefore hypocrisy; and let it be remembered that hypocrisy is itself an evidence, and an acknowledgment, that the motive which it would disguise is bad.

By depending upon war for subsistence, a powerful inducement is given to desire it;

and I would submit it to the conscientious part of the profession that he who desires a war for the sake of its profits has lost something of his virtue.

He has, at least, enlisted one of the most influential of human propensities against it,

and when the prospect of gratification is before him – when the question of war is to be decided – it is to be feared that he will suffer the whispers of interest to prevail and that humanity, religion, and his conscience will be sacrificed to promote it.

But whenever we shall have learned the nature of pure Christianity, and have imbibed its dispositions, we shall not be willing to avail ourselves of such a horrible source of profit;

nor to contribute to the misery, wickedness, and destruction of mankind in order to avoid a false and foolish shame.

It is frequently in the power of individual statesmen to involve a people in a war:

Their restraints,” says Knox, “in the pursuit of political objects, are not those of morality and religion, but solely reasons of state, and political caution.

Plausible words are used, but they are used to hide the deformity of the real principles. Wherever war is deemed desirable in an interested view, a specious pretext never yet remained unfound.

When they have once said what they think convenient, howsoever untruly, they proceed to do what they judge will be profitable, howsoever unjustly;

and this, men very absurdly and unreasonably would have called reason of state, to the discredit of all solid reason, and all rules of probity.

Statesmen have two standards of morality – a social and a political standard:

Political morality embraces all crimes;

except, indeed, that it has that technical virtue which requires that he who may kill a hundred men with bullets, should not kill one with arsenic.

And from this double system of morals it happens, that statesmen who have no restraint to political enormities but political expediency, are sufficiently amiable in private life.

But “probity,” says Bishop Watson, “is a uniform principle; it cannot be put on in our private closet, and put off in the council-chamber or the senate.

I fear that he who is wicked as a statesman, if he is good as a man, has some other motive to goodness than love – that he is decent in private life because it is not expedient that he should be flagitious.

It cannot be hoped that he has much restraint from principle.

I believe, however, the time will come when it will be found that God has instituted but one standard of morality, and that to that standard is required the universal conformity of nations and of men.