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 of a soldier. Even if his commands be 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 command be 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 fail 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 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; 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 be 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 practised 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 a 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 consequent degradation and vice necessary, must itself be bad, and must be utterly incompatible with the principles of Christianity.83
Yet I do not know whether, in its effects on the military character, the greatest moral evil of war is to be sought. 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 vapor; we neither regard nor perceive it, but it secretly undermines the moral health.
Everyone knows that vice is contagious. The depravity of one man has always a tendency to deprave his neighbors; and it therefore requires no unusual acuteness to discover, that the prodigious mass of immorality and crime, which are accumulated by a war, must have a powerful effect in “demoralizing” the public. But there is one circumstance connected with the injurious influence of war, which makes it peculiarly operative and malignant. It is, that we do not hate or fear the influence, and do not fortify ourselves against it. Other vicious influences insinuate themselves into our minds by stealth; but this we receive with open embrace. If a felon exhibits an example of depravity and outrage, we are little likely to be corrupted by it; because we do not love his conduct or approve it. But from whatever cause it happens, the whole system of war is the subject of our complacency or pleasure; and it is therefore that its mischief is so immense. If the soldier who is familiarized with slaughter and rejoices in it, loses some of his Christian dispositions, the citizen who, without committing the slaughter, unites in the exultation, loses also some of his. If he who ravages a city and plunders its inhabitants, impairs his principles of probity, he who approves and applauds the outrage, loses also something of his integrity or benevolence. We acknowledge these truths when applied to other cases. It is agreed that a frequency of capital punishments has a tendency to make the people callous, to harden them against human suffering, and to deprave their moral principles. And the same effect will necessarily be produced by war, of which the destruction of life is incomparably greater, and of which our abhorrence is incomparably less.—The simple truth is, that we are gratified and delighted with things which are incompatible with Christianity, and that our minds therefore become alienated from its love. Our affections cannot be fully directed to “two masters.” If we love and delight in war, we are little likely to love and delight in the dispositions of Christianity.—And the evil is in its own nature of almost universal operation. During a war, a whole people become familiarized with the utmost excesses of enormity—with the utmost intensity of human wickedness—and
