3. Moral consequences
“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich as their country is impoverished:
They rejoice when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation, and laugh from their desks at bravery and science while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract for a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or a battle.”
Our business, however, is principally with the moral effects of war:
“The tenderness of nature and the integrity of manners, which are driven away or powerfully discountenanced by the corruption of war, are not quickly recovered –
and the weeds which grow up in the shortest war can hardly be pulled up and extirpated without a long and unsuspected peace…
War introduces and propagates opinions and practice as much against heaven as against earth:
It lays our natures and manners as waste as our gardens and our habitations, and we can as easily preserve the beauty of the one as the integrity of the other, under the cursed jurisdiction of drums and trumpets.”
“War does more harm to the morals of men than even to their property and persons.”
“It is a temporary repeal of all the principles of virtue.”
“There is not a virtue of gospel goodness but has its ‘death-blow from war.”
I do not know whether the greater sum of moral evil resulting from war is suffered by those who are immediately engaged in it, or by the public: The mischief is most extensive upon the community, but upon the profession it is most intense.
No one pretends to applaud the morals of an army, and for its religion, few think of it at all. A soldier is depraved even to a proverb:
The fact is too notorious to be insisted upon, that thousands who had filled their stations in life with propriety, and been virtuous from principle, have lost, by a military life both the practice and the regard of morality;
and when they have become habituated to the vices of war, have laughed at their honest and plodding brethren who are still spiritless enough for virtue, or stupid enough for piety. The vices that once had shocked them become the subject, not of acquiescence, but of exultation.
“Almost all the professions,” says Dr. Knox, “have some characteristic manners, which they seem to adopt, with little examination, as necessary and as honourable distinctions.
It happens, unfortunately, that profligacy, libertinism, and infidelity are thought, by weaker minds, almost as necessary a part a soldier’s uniform as his insignia.
To hesitate at an oath, to decline intoxication, to profess a regard for religion, would be almost as ignominious as to refuse a challenge.”
It is, however, not necessary to insist upon the immoral influence of war upon the military character, since no one probably will dispute it. Nor is it difficult to discover how the immorality is occasioned:
It is obvious that those who are continually engaged in a practice “in which almost all the vices are incorporated,” and who promote this practice with individual eagerness, cannot, without the intervention of a miracle, be otherwise than collectively depraved.