10. Peculiar contagiousness of military depravity
Everyone knows that vice is contagious:
The depravity of one man always has a tendency to deprave his neighbours;
and it therefore requires no unusual acuity to discover that the prodigious mass of immorality and crime, which are accumulated by a war, must have a powerful effect in “demoralizing” the public.
But there is one circumstance connected with the injurious influence of war that makes it peculiarly operative and malignant:
It is that we do not hate or fear the influence, and do not fortify ourselves against it.
Other vicious influences insinuate themselves into our minds by stealth, but this we receive with open embrace:
If a felon exhibits an example of depravity and outrage, we are not likely to be corrupted by it because we do not love his conduct or approve it.
But from whatever cause it happens, the whole system of war is the subject of our complacency or pleasure; and it is therefore that its mischief is so immense.
If the soldier who is familiarized with slaughter, rejoices in it, and loses some of his Christian dispositions, the citizen who, without committing the slaughter, unites in the exultation also loses some of his.
If he who ravages a city and plunders its inhabitants impairs his principles of probity, he who approves and applauds the outrage also loses something of his integrity or benevolence.
We acknowledge these truths when applied to other cases:
It is agreed that a frequency of capital punishments has a tendency to make the people callous, to harden them against human suffering, and to deprave their moral principles.
And the same effect will necessarily be produced by war, of which the destruction of life is incomparably greater, and of which our abhorrence is incomparably less.
The simple truth is that we are gratified and delighted with things which are incompatible with Christianity, and that our minds therefore become alienated from its love.
Our affections cannot be fully directed to “two masters.” If we love and delight in war, we are less likely to love and delight in the dispositions of Christianity. And the evil is in its own nature of almost universal operation.
During a war, a whole people becomes familiarized with the utmost excesses of enormity – with the utmost intensity of human wickedness –
and they rejoice and exult in them, do that there is probably not an individual in a hundred who does not lose something of his Christian principles by a ten year war.
The effect of the system in preventing the perception, the love, and the operation of Christian principles, in the minds of men who know the nature and obligations of them, needs little illustration:
We often see that Christianity cannot accord with the system, but the conviction does not often operate on our minds. In one of the speeches of Bishop Watson in the House of Lords, there occur these words:
“Would to God, my lords, that the spirit of the Christian religion would exert its influence over the hearts of individuals in their public capacity:
Then would revenge, avarice, and ambition, which have fattened the earth with the blood of her children, be banished from the counsels of princes, and there would be no more war.
The time will come – the prophet has said it, and I believe it – the time will assuredly come when nation, literally speaking, shall no longer lift up hand against nation.
No man will rejoice, my lords, more than I shall, to see the time when peace shall depend on obedience to the benevolent principles of the gospel.”
This is language becoming a Christian:
Would it have been believed that this same man voluntarily and studiously added almost one-half to the power of gunpowder in order that the ball, which before would kill only six men, might now kill ten;
and that he did this, knowing that this purpose was to spread wider destruction and bloodier slaughter?
Above all,
would it have been believed that he recorded this achievement as an evidence of his sagacity, and that he recorded it in the book that contains the declaration I have quoted?
The same consequences attach to the influence of the soldier’s personal character: Whatever that character may be, if it arises out of his profession, we seldom regard it with repulsion:
We look upon him as a man whose honour and spirit compensate for “venial errors.” If he is spirited and gallant, we ask not for his virtue and care not for his profligacy.
We look upon the sailor as a brave and noble fellow who may reasonably be allowed droll profaneness, and sailor-like debaucheries – debaucheries that, in the paid-off crew of a man-of-war, seem sometimes to be animated by…
We are, however, much diverted by them. The sailor’s cool and clumsy vices are very amusing to us; and so that he amuses us, we are indifferent to his crimes:
That some men should be wicked is bad – that the many should feel complacency in wickedness is, perhaps, worse.
We may flatter ourselves with dreams of our own virtue, but that virtue is very questionable:
Those principles are quite inoperative, those that permit us to receive pleasure from the contemplation of human depravity, with whatever “honour or spirit” that depravity is connected.
Such principles and virtue will provide, at any rate, little resistance to temptation:
An abhorrence of wickedness is more than an outwork of the moral citadel. He who does not hate vice has opened a passage for its entrance.