15. Objections from the distinction
between the duties of private and public life
There is, however, one argument brought against us, which, if it is just, precludes at once all question upon the subject:
that a distinction is to be made between rules which apply to us as individuals, and rules which apply to us as subjects of the state;
and that the pacific injunctions of Christ from the Mount, and all the other kindred commands and prohibitions of the Christian Scriptures, have no reference to our conduct as members of the political body.
This is the argument to which the greatest importance is attached by the advocates of war, and by which thinking men are chiefly induced to acquiesce in its lawfulness.
In reality, some of those who think most acutely upon the subject acknowledge that the peaceable, forbearing, forgiving dispositions of Christianity are absolutely obligatory upon individuals in their full extent, and this acknowledgment I would entreat the reader to bear in his recollection.
Now it is obvious that the proof of the rectitude of this distinction must be expected of those who make it:
General rules are laid down by Christianity, of which, in some cases, the advocate of war denies the applicability. He, therefore, is to produce the reason and the authority for exception.
Now we would remind him that general rules are binding, unless their inapplicability can be clearly shown.
We would remind him that the general rules in question are laid down by the commissioned ministers of Jesus Christ and by Jesus Christ himself,
and we would recommend him, therefore, to hesitate before he institutes exceptions to those rules upon any authority inferior to the authority that made them.
The foundation for the distinction between the duties of individuals and those of communities must, we suppose, be sought in one of these two positions:
1. That because no law of general authority exists among nations, by which one state is protected from the violence of another,
it is necessary that each independent community should protect itself, and that the security of a nation cannot sometimes be maintained otherwise than by war.
2. That because the general utility and expediency of actions is the foundation of their moral qualities, and because it is sometimes most conducive to general utility and expediency that there should be a war, war is, therefore, sometimes lawful.
The first of these positions will probably be thus enforced.
If an individual suffers aggression, there is a power to which he can apply that is above himself and above the aggressor, a power by which the bad passions of those around him are restrained, or by which their aggressions are punished.
But among nations there is no acknowledged superior or common arbitrator:
Even if there were, there is no way in which its decisions could be enforced, but by the sword. War, therefore, is the only means which one nation possesses of protecting itself from the aggression of another.
This, certainly, is plausible reasoning; but it happens to this argument as to many others, that it assumes that as established, which has not been proved, and upon the proof of which the truth of the whole argument depends:
It assumes that the reason why an individual is not permitted to use violence is that the law will use it for him.
And in this the fallacy of the position consists,
for the foundation of the duty of forbearance in private life is not that the law will punish aggression, but that Christianity requires forbearance.
Undoubtedly, if the existence of a common arbitrator were the foundation of the duty, the duty would not be binding upon nations.
But that which we require to be proved is this: that Christianity exonerates nations from those duties that she has imposed upon individuals.
This, the present argument does not prove; and, in truth, with a singular unhappiness in its application, it assumes, in effect, that she has imposed these duties upon neither the one nor the other.