9. Military power despotic
No one questions whether military power is arbitrary. “That which governs an army,” says Paley, “is despotism,” and the subjects of despotic power we call slaves.
Yet a man may live under an arbitrary prince with only the liability to slavery. He may live and die, unmolested in his person and unrestrained in his freedom.
But the despotism of an army is an operative despotism, and a soldier is practically and personally a slave: Submission to arbitrary authority is the business of his life; the will of the despot is his rule of action.
It is vain to urge that if this is slavery, everyone who labours for another is a slave; because there is a difference between the subjection of a soldier and that of all other labourers, in which the essence of slavery consists:
If I order my servant to perform a given action, he is at liberty, if he thinks the action improper, or if, from any other cause, he chooses not to do it, to refuse his obedience. I can discharge him from my service indeed, but I cannot compel obedience or punish his refusal.
The soldier is thus punished or compelled:
It matters not whether he has entered the service voluntarily or involuntarily; being there, he is required to do what may be, and what in fact, often is, opposed to his will and his judgment.
If he refuses obedience, he is dreadfully punished; his flesh, is lacerated and torn from his body, and finally, if he persists in his refusal, he may be shot.
Neither is he permitted to leave the service. His natural right to go wherever he would, of which nothing but his own crimes otherwise deprives him, is denied to him by war:
If he attempts to exercise this right he is pursued as a felon; he is brought back in irons and is miserably tortured for “desertion.” This, therefore, we think is slavery.
I have heard it contended that an apprentice is a slave equally with a soldier,
but it appears to be forgotten that an apprentice is consigned to the government of another because he is not able to govern himself.
But even were apprenticeship to continue through life, it would serve the objection but little:
Neither custom nor law allows a master to require his apprentice to do an immoral action. There is nothing in his authority analogous to that which compels a soldier to do what he is persuaded is wicked or unjust.
Neither, again, can a master compel the obedience of an apprentice by the punishments that a soldier receives:
Even if his commands are reasonable, he cannot, for refractoriness, torture him into a swoon, and then revive him with stimulants only to torture him again; still less can he take him to a field and shoot him:
And if the commands are vicious, he may not punish his disobedience at all.
Bring the despotism that governs an army into the government of the state, and what would Englishmen say? They would say, with one voice, that Englishmen were slaves.
If this view of military subjection fails to affect our pride, we are to attribute the failure to that power of public opinion by which all things seem reconcilable to us;
by which situations that would otherwise be loathsome and revolting are made not only tolerable but also pleasurable.
Take away the influence and the gloss of public opinion from the situation of a soldier, and what should we call it?
We should call it a state of insufferable degradation and of pitiable slavery.
But public opinion, although it may influence notions, cannot alter things:
Whatever may be our notion of the soldier’s situation, he has indisputably resigned both his moral and his natural liberty to the government of despotic power.
He has added to ordinary slavery, the slavery of the conscience; and he is therefore, in a twofold sense, a slave.
If I am asked why I thus complain of the nature of military obedience, I answer, with Dr. Watson,
that all “despotism is an offence against natural justice. It is a degradation of the dignity of man, and ought not, on any occasion, to be either practiced or submitted to.”
I answer that the obedience of a soldier does, in point of fact, depress the erectness and independence of his mind.
I answer, again, that it is a sacrifice of his moral agency, which impairs and vitiates his principles, and which our religion emphatically condemns.
And, finally and principally, I answer that such obedience is not defended or permitted for any other purpose than the prosecution of war, and that it is therefore powerful evidence against the solitary system that requires it.
I do not question the necessity of despotism to war:
It is because I know that it is necessary that I thus refer to it;
for I say that whatever makes such despotism and the consequent degradation and vice necessary must itself be bad, and must be utterly incompatible with the principles of Christianity.
Yet I do not know whether the greatest moral evil of war is to be sought in its effects on the military character:
Upon the community its effects are indeed less apparent, because they who are the secondary subjects of the immoral influence are less intensely affected by it than the immediate agents of its diffusion.
But whatever is deficient in the degree of evil is probably more than compensated by its extent. The influence is like that of a continual and noxious vapour; we neither regard nor perceive it, but it secretly undermines the moral health.