To what a situation is a rational and responsible being reduced, who commits actions, good or bad, mischievous or beneficial, at the word of another? I can conceive no greater degradation. It is the lowest, the final abjectness of the moral nature. It is this if we abate the glitter of war, and if we add this glitter it is nothing more. Surely the dignity of reason, and the light of revelation, and our responsibility to God, should make us pause before we become the voluntary subjects of this monstrous system.
I do not know, indeed, under what circumstances of responsibility a man supposes himself to be placed, who thus abandons and violates his own sense of rectitude and of his duties. Either he is responsible for his actions or he is not; and the question is a serious one to determine. Christianity has certainly never stated any cases in which personal responsibility ceases. If she admits such cases, she has at least not told us so; but she has told us, explicitly and repeatedly, that she does require individual obedience and impose individual responsibility. She has made no exceptions to the imperativeness of her obligations, whether we are required to neglect them or not; and I can discover in her sanctions, no reasons to suppose that in her final adjudications she admits the plea that another required us to do that which she required us to forbear.—But it may be feared, it may be believed, that how little soever religion will abate of the responsibility of those who obey, she will impose not a little upon those who command. They, at least, are answerable for the enormities of war; unless, indeed, anyone shall tell me that responsibility attaches nowhere; that that which would be wickedness in another man, is innocence in a soldier; and that Heaven has granted to the directors of war a privileged immunity, by virtue of which crime incurs no guilt and receives no punishment.
It appears to me that the obedience which war exacts to arbitrary power possesses more of the character of servility and even of slavery, than we are accustomed to suppose; and as I think this consideration may reasonably affect our feeling of independence, how little soever higher considerations may affect our consciences, I would allow myself a few sentences upon the subject. I will acknowledge that when I see a company of men in a stated dress, and of a stated color, ranged, rank and file, in the attitude of obedience, turning or walking at the word of another, now changing the position of a limb and now altering the angle of a foot, I feel humiliation and shame. I feel humiliation and shame when I think of the capacities and the prospects of man, at seeing him thus drilled into obsequiousness and educated into machinery. I do not know whether I shall be charged with indulging in idle sentiment or idler affectation. If I hold unusual language upon the subject, let it be remembered that the subject is itself unusual. I will retract my affectation and sentiment, if the reader will show me any case in life parallel to that to which I have applied it.
No one questions whether military power be 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 be slavery, everyone who labors for another is a slave; because there is a difference between the subjection of a soldier and that of all other laborers, in which the essence of slavery consists. If I order my servant to do a given action, he is at liberty, if he think the action improper, or if, from any other cause, he choose 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 have 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 refuse 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 whither he would, of which nothing but his own crimes otherwise deprives him, is denied to him by war. If he attempt to exercise this right, he is pursued as a felon, he is brought back
