5. Incapacity for regular pursuits – half-pay
Another means by which war becomes pernicious to the moral character of the soldier is the incapacity that the profession occasions for the sober pursuits of life:
“The profession of a soldier,” says Dr. Paley, “almost always unfits men for the business of regular occupations.”
On the question of whether it would be better that of three inhabitants of a village, one should be a soldier and two farmers, or that all should occasionally become both,
he says that from the latter arrangement the country receives three raw militia men and three idle and profligate peasants.
War cannot be continual. Soldiers must at some point become citizens, citizens who are unfit for stated business will be idle, and they who are idle will scarcely be virtuous.
A political project, therefore, such as a war, which will eventually pour fifty or a hundred thousand of such men upon the community, must of necessity be an enormous evil to a state.
It is an infelicitous defence to say that soldiers do not become idle until the war is closed, or until they leave the army:
To keep men out of idleness by employing them in cutting other men’s limbs and bodies is at least an extraordinary economy, and the profligacy still remains, for, unhappily, if war keeps soldiers busy, it does not keep them good.
By a peculiar and unhappy coincidence, the moral evil attendant upon the profession is perpetuated by the subsequent system of half-pay.
We have no concern with this system on political or pecuniary considerations, but it will be obvious that those who return from war with the principles and habits of war are unlikely to improve, either by a life without necessary occupation, or without express object.
By this system, there are thousands of men in the prime or in the bloom of life who live without such object or occupation. This would be an evil if it happened to any set of men, but upon men who have been soldiers the evil is peculiarly intense.
He whose sense of moral obligation has been impaired by the circumstances of his former life, and whose former life has induced habits of disinclination to regular pursuits, is the man who, above all others, it is unfortunate for the interests of purity should be supported on “half-pay.”
If war has occasioned “unfitness for regular occupations,” he will not pursue them; if it has familiarized him with profligacy, he will be little restrained by virtue.
And the consequences of consigning men under such circumstances to society, at a period of life when the mind is busy and restless and the passions are strong, must, of inevitable necessity be bad.
The officer who leaves the army with the income only which the country allows him often finds sufficient difficulty in maintaining the character of a gentleman.
A “gentleman” however he will be;
and he who resolves to appear rich while he is poor, who will not increase his fortune by industry, and who has learned to have few restraints from principle,
sometimes easily persuades himself to pursue schemes of but very exceptionable probity. Indeed, by his peculiar law, the “law of honour,” honesty is not required.
I do not know whether it is politic that he who has held a commission should not be expected to use a ledger or a yard;
but since, by thus becoming a “military gentleman,” the number is increased of those who regulate their conduct by the law of honour, the rule is necessarily pernicious in its effects.
When it is considered that this law allows of “profaneness, neglect of public worship and private devotion, cruelty to servants, rigorous treatment of tenants or other dependants,
want of charity to the poor, injuries to tradesmen by insolvency or delay of payment, with numberless examples of the same kind;”
that it is “in most instances, favourable to the licentious indulgence of the natural passions;”
that it allows of “adultery, drunkenness, prodigality, duelling, and of revenge in the extreme;”
when all this is considered, it is manifestly inevitable that those who regulate their conduct by the maxims of such a law must become, as a body, reduced to a low station in the scale of morality.
We insist upon these things because they are the consequences of war.
We have no concern with “half-pay” or with the “law of honour,” but with war, which extends the evil of the one, and creates the evil of the other.
Soldiers may be depraved, and part of their depravity is, undoubtedly, their crime, but part also is their misfortune.
The whole evil is imputable to war;
and we say that this evil forms a powerful evidence against it, whether we direct that evidence to the abstract question of its lawfulness or to the practical question of its expediency.
That can scarcely be lawful which necessarily occasions such enormous depravity.
That can scarcely be expedient which is so pernicious to virtue, and therefore to the state.