suspect it will be found that all the difficulties of such phlebotomy belong to the patient, but the facilities to the surgeon. Mere martial glory, independent of all considerations as to the necessity and the justice of our arms, is now fast descending, with many other worn out fooleries, to the tomb of all the Capulets, where attended by bankrupt agents, disgorged contractors, and starving commissaries, let us pray that with all due military honours, it may be speedily buried and embalmed; let hireling poets indite its dirge, and meddling monks say masses for its soul. All wars of interference arising from an officious intrusion into the concerns of other states, all wars of ambition carried on for the purposes of aggrandizement, and all wars of aggression undertaken for the purpose of forcing an assent to this or that set of religious opinions, all such wars are criminal in their very outset, and have hypocrisy for their common base. First there is the hypocrisy of encumbering our neighbour with an officiousness of help, that pretends his good, but means our own; then there is the hypocrisy of ambition, where some restless and grasping potentate, knowing that he is about to injure and insult, puts forth a jesuitical preamble, purporting that he himself has been first insulted, and injured; but nations have the justest cause to feel a fear that is real, when such begin to express a fear that is feigned. Then comes the hypocrisy of those who would persuade us that to kill, burn, and destroy, for conscience sake, is an acceptable service, and that religion is to be supported by trampling under foot those primary principles of love, charity and forbearance, without which it were better to have none. Lastly comes a minor and subordinate hypocrisy, common to the three kinds I have stated above; I mean that of those who pretend most deeply to deplore the miseries of war, and who even weep over them, with the tears of the crocodile, but who will not put a stop to war, although they have the means, because they find their own private account in continuing it, from the emoluments it bestows, and from the patronage it confers. Like Fabius, they also profit by delay, "cunctando restituere rem," but they do so with a very different motive, not to restore the shattered fortunes of their country, but their own. Neither must we forget, in this view of our subject, the raw and ignorant recruit, whom to delude and to kidnap, a whole system of fraud and hypocrisy is marshalled out and arrayed; The grim idol of war is tricked out and flounced in all the colours of the rainbow, the neighing steed awaits her nod, music attends her footsteps, and jollity caters at her board; but no sooner is the sickle exchanged for the sword, and the fell contract signed, than he finds that this Bellona whom he had wooed as a goddess in courtship, turns out to be a dæmon in possession, that terror is her constant purveyor, and that her alternate caterers are privation and waste; that her sojourn is with the slain, and her abode with the pestilence, that her fascinations are more fatal than those of the basilisk, that her brightest smile is danger, and that her warmest embrace is death. But we are told that civilization marches in the rear of conquest, and that barbarous nations have received this boon at least, from the refined and polished blades of their victors. But this argument in favour of war, may I trust, be neutralized, by the consideration that the strongest hands have not always been united to the brightest heads; for the rudest nations have in their turn retaliated on the most refined, and from a darkness more dense than that of Egypt, the thunderbolt of victory has been elicited, as the brightest lightning from the blackest cloud. Greece has twice surrendered her independence and her liberties to masters in every thing, but force far inferior to herself; the first treated her as a mistress, the second as a slave. And imperial Rome* herself, in her "No Freedom no, I will not tell How Rome, before thy weeping face With heaviest sound a Giant Statue fell; Pushed by a wild and artless race From off its wide ambitious base: When Time his northern sons of spoil awoke, And every blended work of strength and grace, high and palmy state when in the proudest possession of all the arts of each Minerva, was doomed in her turn to be the prey of a savage horde that despised both, and studied neither. But if the argument I am combating ever had any force, it could only have been when knowledge was in its infancy, and the world in its childhood. The general spread of civilization, by commerce, the sciences, and the arts, those legitimate daughters not of war but of peace, not of the vulture, but of the halcyon, these are the blessings that will make the hardiest advocate shrink from recommending warfare as a present instrument of civilization; particularly in an era that presents us with means far more grateful, elegant, and efficacious, an era when we have the safety-lamp of science to resort to, a lamp that gives us all the light, but none of the conflagration. In fact the demoralizing tendencies of war are so notorious, that to insist upon them would be to insult the understanding of my readers, and to purchase refinement at the expence of virtue, would be to purchase tinsel at the price of gold. The most peace-loving minister that ever governed the affairs of a nation, decidedly declared, that even the most successful war often left a people more poor, always more profligate than it found them. Where a nation rises with one consent to shake off the yoke of oppression either from within or from without, all fair concessions having been proposed in vain, here indeed we have a motive that both dignifies the effort, and consecrates the success; here indeed the most peaceable sect of the most peaceable religion might conscientiously combine. But alas how few wars have been justified by such a principle, and how few warriors by such a plea; and when they have, how unfortunate have they usually been in the choice of their leaders; in the motley mob of conquerors, and of captains how few Washingtons or Alfreds shall we find. The children With many a rude repeated stroke, And many a savage yell to thousand fragments broke." Collins' Ode to Freedom. of those days, when the world was young, rude as the times they lived in, and rash at once from ignorance and from inexperience, amused themselves with the toys and the trumpets, the gewgaws and the glitter of war. But we who live in the maturity of things, who to the knowledge of the present, add a retrospection of the past, we who alone can fairly be termed the antients, or be said to live in the olden time, we, I trust, are no longer to be deluded or befooled by this brilliant but baleful meteor, composed of visionary good, but of substantial evil. We live in the manhood and in the fullness of time, and the triumphs of truth and of reason, triumphs bright as bloodless, these are the proper business and the boast of those, who having put away childish things, are becoming men. There are some that with oracular gravity will inform us, that as wars have ever been, they must on that account continue to be; but they might as well assert that the imbecillity and ignorance that marked the conduct of our forefathers, those antient moderns, who lived in the infancy of the world, and in the childhood of time, must and doth exist at present, because it existed then. With one solitary exception, all warfare is built upon hypocrisy, acting upon ignorance; ignorance it was that lent success to Mahomet's miracles, and to Cromwell's cant. For lack of knowledge a people is destroyed, and knowledge alone it is, that is worthy of holding the freest minds in the firmest thraldom. Unlike those of the warrior, the triumphs of knowledge derive all their lustre, not from the evil they have produced, but from the good; her successes and her conquests are the common property of the world, and succeeding ages will be the watchful guardians of the rich legacies she bequeaths. But the trophies and the titles of the conqueror are on the quick march to oblivion, and amid that desolation where they were planted, will decay. For what are the triumphs of war,* planned by ambition, exe Speaking of the conqueror, the inspired writer observes that "before him the land is as the Garden of Eden, behind him as the desolate wilder cuted by violence, and consummated by devastation, the means are the sacrifice of the many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few. Knowledge has put a stop to chivalry, as she one day will to war, and Cervantes has laughed out of the field those self-constituted legislators that carried the sword but not the scales of justice, and who were mounted and mailed. I am no advocate for a return of this state of things; but when that heroic and chivalric spirit was abroad, when men volunteered on dangers for the good of others, without emolument, and laid down the sword when that for which they resorted to it was overcome, then indeed a measure of respect and admiration awaited them, and a feeling, honourable to both parties, was entertained. But is it not both absurd and ridiculous to transfer this respect and esteem to those who make a trade of warfare, and who barter for blood? who are as indifferent as the sword they draw, to the purposes for which it is drawn, who put on the badge of a master, wear his livery, and receive his pay. Where all is mercenary, nothing can be magnanimous; and it is impossible to have the slightest respect for an animated mass of machinery, that moves alike at the voice of a drum, or a despot: a trumpet, or a tyrant: a fife, or a fool. ness," and that poet who drank deepest of the sacred stream, has the following lines: "They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries, and in field great battles win, Violent or shameful death their due reward." JOHN MILTON. |
