Books – Historians – Poets
Crimes should be traced to their causes, and guilt should be fixed upon those who occasion, although they may not perpetrate them.
And to whom are the frequency and the crimes of war to be principally attributed?
To the directors of public opinion, to the declaimers upon glory, to men who sit quietly at home in their studies and at their desks:
to the historian, the biographer, the poet, the moral philosopher, the pamphleteer, the editor of the newspaper, and to the teacher of religion.
Oh! How unlike another exhortation:
“Put on mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man has a quarrel against any.”
“As long as mankind,” says Gibbon, “shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst for military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
“It is strange to imagine,” says the Earl of Shaftesbury, “that war, which of all things appears the most savage, should be the passion of the most heroic spirits.”
But he gives us the reason: “By a small misguidance of the affection, a lover of mankind becomes a ravager; a hero and deliverer becomes an oppressor and destroyer.”
This is the “vice” and this is the “ misguidance” we say that a large proportion of the writers of every civilized country are continually occasioning and promoting;
and thus, perhaps without any purpose of mischief, they contribute more to the destruction of mankind than rapine or ambition.
A writer thinks, perhaps, that it is not much harm to applaud bravery:
The divergence from virtue may, indeed, be small in its beginning, but the effect of his applause proceeds in the line of obliquity, until it conducts, at last, to every excess of outrage, to every variety of crime, and to every mode of human destruction.
There is one species of declamation on the glories of those who die in battle, to which I would beg the notice of the reader:
We are told that when the last breath of exultation and defiance is departed, the intrepid spirit rises triumphantly from the field of glory to its kindred heavens:
What the hero has been on earth, it matters not. If he dies by a musket ball, he enters heaven in his own right.
All men like to suppose that they shall attain felicity at last, and to find that they can attain it without goodness and in spite of vice, is doubtless peculiarly solacing.
The history of the hero’s achievements wants, indeed, completeness without it; and this gratuitous transfer of his soul to heaven forms an agreeable conclusion to his story.
I would be far from “dealing damnation round the land,” and undoubtedly believe that of those who fall in battle, many have found an everlasting resting place.
But an indiscriminate consignment of the brave to felicity is certainly unwarranted; and if wickedness consists in the promotion of wickedness, it is wicked too.
If we say in positive and glowing language, of men indiscriminately, and therefore of the bad, that they rise on the wings of ecstasy to heaven, we do all that language can do in the encouragement of profligacy.
The terrors of religion may still be dreaded; but we have, at least to the utmost of our power, diminished their influence.
The mind willingly accepts the assurance, or acquiesces in the falsehood that it wishes to be true;
and in spite of all their better knowledge, it may be feared that some continue in profligacy, in the doubting hope that what poets and historians tell them may not be a fiction.
Perhaps the most operative encouragement that these declamations give to the soldier’s vices is contained in this circumstance:
that they manifest that public opinion does not hold them in abhorrence:
Public opinion is one of the most efficacious regulators of the passions of mankind; and upon the soldier this rein is peculiarly influential:
His profession and his personal conduct derive almost all their value and their reputation from the opinion of the world, and from that alone.
If, therefore, the public voice does not censure his vices –
if, in spite of his vices, it awards him everlasting happiness, what restraint remains upon his passions, or what is the wonder if they are not restrained?
The peculiar application of the subject to our purpose is, however, that these and similar representations are motives to the profession of arms:
The military life is made a privileged profession, in which a man may indulge vices with impunity. His occupation is an apology for his crimes, and shields them from punishment.
And what greater motive for the military life can be given?
Or what can be more atrocious than the crime of those who give it?
I know not, indeed, whether the guilt predominates, or the folly:
Pitiable imbecility surely it is, that can persuade itself to sacrifice all the beauties of virtue, and all the realities and terrors of religion, to the love of the flowing imagery of spirits ascending to heaven.
Whether writers shall do this is a question, not of choice, but of duty. If we would not be the abettors of crime, and the sharers of its guilt, it is imperative that we refrain.
The reader will, perhaps, have observed that some of those writers who are liberal contributors to the military passion occasionally,
in moments when truth and nature seem to have burst the influence of habit, emphatically condemn the system that they have so often contributed to support.
There are not many books of which the tendency is more warlike, or which are more likely to stimulate the passion for martial glory, than The Life of Nelson, by Southey;
a work in the composition of which it probably never suggested itself to the author to inquire whether he was not contributing to the destruction of mankind.
A contributor, however as he has been, we find in another of his works this extraordinary and memorable passage:
“There is but one community of Christians in the world, and that unhappily, of all communities one of the smallest,
enlightened enough to understand the prohibition of war by our Divine Master, in its plain, literal, and undeniable sense; and conscientious enough to obey it, subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience.”
Of these voluntary or involuntary testimonies of the mind against the principles that it habitually possesses, and habitually inculcates, many examples might be given;
and they are valuable testimonies, because they appear to be elicited by the influence of simple nature and unclouded truth. This, I think, is their obvious character.
They will commonly be found to have been written when the mind has become sobered by reason, or tranquilized by religion;
when the feelings are not excited by external stimulants, and when conquest, honour, and glory are reduced to that station of importance to which truth assigns them.
But whether such testimonies have much tendency to give conviction to a reader, I know not:
Surrounded as they are with a general contrariety of sentiment, it is possible that those who read them may pass them by as the speculations of impracticable morality.
I cannot, however, avoid recommending the reader, whenever he meets with passages like these, to seriously examine into their meaning and their force,
to inquire whether they are not accordant with the purity of truth, and whether they do not possess the greater authority because they have forced themselves from the mind when least likely to be deceived, and in opposition to all its habits and all its associations.
Such, then, are among the principal of the causes of war. Some consist in want of thought, and some in delusion; some are mercenary, and some simply criminal.
Whether any or all of them form a motive for the desolation of empires and to human destruction, such as a good or a reasoning man, who abstracts himself from habitual feelings, can contemplate with approbation, is a question which everyone should ask and determine for himself.
A conflict of nations is a serious thing. No motive arising from our passions should occasion it, or have any influence in occasioning it.
Supposing the question of lawfulness to be superseded, war should be imposed only by stern, inevitable, unyielding necessity. That such a necessity is contained in these motives, I think cannot be shown.
We may, therefore, reasonably question the defensibility of the custom, which is continued by such causes and supported by such motives.
If a tree is known by its fruits, we may also judge the fruit by the tree. “Men do not gather grapes from thorns.”
If the motives for war and its causes are impure, war itself cannot be virtuous; and I would, therefore, solemnly invite the reader to give to the succeeding Inquiry, his sober and Christian attention.