12. Privateering – Its peculiar atrocity
There is one mode of hostility that is allowed and encouraged by war that appears to be distinguished by peculiar atrocity: I mean privateering. If war could be shown to be necessary or right, I think this, at least, would be indefensible.
It would surely be enough that army slaughtered army, and that fleet destroyed fleet, without arming individual avarice for private plunder and legalizing robbery because it is not of our countrymen.
Who are the victims of this plunder, and what are its effects?
Does it produce any mischief to our enemies but the ruin of those who perhaps would gladly have been friends;
of those who are made enemies only by the will of their rulers, and who now conduct their commerce with no other solicitude about the war than how they may escape the rapine which it sanctions?
Privateering can scarcely plead even the merit of public mischief in its favour. An empire is not injured much by the wretchedness and starvation of a few of its citizens.
The robbery may, indeed, be carried to such extent, and such multitudes may be plundered, that the ruin of individuals may impart poverty to a state:
But for this mischief the privateer can seldom hope. And what is that practice, of which the only topic of defence is the enormity of its mischief!
There is a yet more dreadful consideration:
The privateer is not only a robber, but also a murderer. If he cannot otherwise plunder his victim, human life is no obstacle to his rapine. Robbery is his object, and his object he will attain.
Nor has he the ordinary excuses of slaughter in his defence. His government does not require it of him. He makes no pretext of patriotism, but robs and murders of his own choice, and simply for gain.
The soldier makes a bad apology when he pleads the command of his superior, but the privateer has no command to plead;
and with no object but plunder, he deliberately seeks a set of ruffians who are unprincipled enough for robbery and ferocious enough for murder, and sallies with them upon the ocean, like tigers upon a desert, and like tigers prowling for prey.
To talk of Christianity as permitting these monstrous proceedings implies deplorable fatuity or more deplorable profaneness.
I would, however, hope that he who sends out a privateer has not so little shame as to pretend to conscience or honesty. If he will be a robber and a murderer, let him at least not be a hypocrite, for it is hypocrisy for such men to pretend to religion or morality.
He that thus robs the subjects of another country wants nothing but impunity to make him rob his neighbour. He has no restraint from principle.
I know not how it happens that men make pretensions to Christianity while they sanction or promote such prodigious wickedness. It is sufficiently certain that whatever be their pretensions to it, it is not operative upon their conduct.
Such men may talk of religion, but they neither possess nor regard it;
and although I would not embrace in such censure those who, without immediate or remote participation in the crime, look upon it with secret approbation because it injures their “enemies,”
I would nevertheless suggest to their consideration whether their moral principles are at that point in the scale of purity and benevolence which religion enjoins.