An Inquiry Into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity

the peace, none will question whether they have been brought upon us by war. The peace may be the occasion of them, but war has been the cause. I have no wish to declaim upon the amount of our national debt⁠—that it is a great evil, and that it has been brought upon us by successive contests, no one disputes. Such considerations, ought, undoubtedly, to influence the conduct of public men in their disagreements with other states, even if higher considerations do not influence it. They ought to form part of the calculations of the evil of hostility. I believe that a greater mass of human suffering and loss of human enjoyment are occasioned by the pecuniary distresses of a war, than any ordinary advantages of a war, compensate. But this consideration seems too remote to obtain our notice. Anger at offence, or hope of triumph, overpowers the sober calculations of reason, and outbalances the weight of after and long continued calamities. If the happiness of the people were, what it ought to be, the primary and the ultimate object of national measures, I think that the policy which pursued this object would often find that even the pecuniary distresses resulting from a war make a greater deduction from the quantum of felicity, than those evils which the war may have been designed to avoid. At least the distress is certain; the advantage doubtful. It is known that during the past eight years of the present peace, a considerable portion of the community have been in suffering in consequence of war. Eight years of suffering to a million of human creatures, is a serious thing! “It is no answer to say, that this universal suffering, and even the desolation that attends it, are the inevitable consequences and events of war, how warrantably soever entered into, but rather an argument that no war can be warrantably entered into, that may produce such intolerable mischiefs.”73

There is much of truth, as there is of eloquence, in these observations of one of the most acute intellects that our country has produced:⁠—“It is wonderful with what coolness and indifference the greater part of mankind see war commenced. Those that hear of it at a distance, or read of it in books, but have never presented its evils to their minds, consider it as little more than a splendid game, a proclamation, an army, a battle, and a triumph. Some, indeed, must perish in the most successful field; but they die upon the bed of honor, resign their lives amidst the joys of conquest, and filled with England’s glory, smile in death. The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroic fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy. The rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction, gasping and groaning, unpitied amongst men made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery; and were at last whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice, and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless and enterprise impracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.

“Thus is a people gradually exhausted for the most part with little effect. The wars of civilized nations make very slow changes in the system of empire. The public perceives scarcely any alteration but an increase of debt; and the few individuals who are benefited, are not supposed to have the clearest right to their advantages. If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy. But at the conclusion of a ten years’ war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, and contractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations?

“These are the men, who without virtue, labor, 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 from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or a tempest.”74

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.”75

“War does more harm to the morals of men than even to their property and persons.”76 “It is a temporary repeal of all the principles of virtue.”77 “There is not a virtue of Gospel goodness but has its deathblow from war.”78

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.

Rara fides pietasque viris qui castra sequuntur.

—⁠Lucan

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