A support more systematic and powerful is, however, given to war, because it offers to the higher ranks of society, a profession which unites gentility with profit, and which, without the vulgarity of trade, maintains or enriches them. It is of little consequence to inquire whether the distinction of vulgarity between the toils of war and the toils of commerce, be fictitious. In the abstract, it is fictitious; but of this species of reputation public opinion holds the arbitrium, et jus, et norma—and public opinion is in favor of war.
The army and the navy therefore afford to the middle and higher classes, a most acceptable profession. The profession of arms is like the profession of law or physic—a regular source of employment and profit. Boys are educated for the army, as they are educated for the bar; and parents appear to have no other idea than that war is part of the business of the world. Of younger sons, whose fathers do not choose to support them at the expense of the heir, the army and the navy are the common resource. They would not know what to do without them. To many of these, the news of a peace becomes a calamity; principle is not powerful enough to cope with interest; they prefer the desolation of the world to the loss of a colonelcy. It is in this manner that much of the rank, the influence, and the wealth of a country become interested in the promotion of wars; and when a custom is promoted by wealth, and influence, and rank, what is the wonder that it should be continued?
Yet it is a dreadful consideration that the destruction of our fellows should become a business by which to live; and that a man can find no other occupation of gain, than that of butchering his neighbors. It is said (if my memory serves me, by Sir Walter Raleigh), “He that taketh up his rest to live by this profession shall hardly be an honest man.” “Where there is no obligation to obey,” says Lord Clarendon, “it is a wonderful, and an unnatural appetite, that disposes men to be soldiers, that they may know how to live; and what reputation soever it may have in politics, it can have none in religion, to say, that the art and conduct of a soldier is not infused by nature, but by study, experience and observation; and therefore that men are to learn it:—when, in truth, this common argument is made by appetite to excuse, and not by reason to support, an ill custom.”4 People do not often become soldiers in order to serve their country, but to serve themselves. An income is commonly the motive to the great, and idleness to the poor. To plead the love of our country is therefore hypocrisy; and let it be remembered that hypocrisy is itself an evidence, and an acknowledgment that the motive which it would disguise is bad.
By depending upon war for a subsistence, a powerful inducement is given to desire it; and I would submit it to the conscientious part of the profession, that he who desires a war for the sake of its profits has lost something of his virtue; he has, at least enlisted one of the most influential of human propensities against it, and when the prospect of gratification is before him—when the question of war is to be decided—it is to be feared that he will suffer the whispers of interest to prevail, and that humanity and religion, and his conscience will be sacrificed to promote it. But whenever we shall have learned the nature of pure Christianity, and have imbibed its dispositions, we shall not be willing to avail ourselves of such a horrible source of profit; nor to contribute to the misery, and wickedness, and destruction of mankind, in order to avoid a false and foolish shame.
It is frequently in the power of individual statesmen to involve a people in a war. “Their restraints,” says Knox, “in the pursuit of political objects, are not those of morality and religion, but solely reasons of state and political caution. Plausible words are used, but they are used to hide the deformity of the real principles. Whenever war is deemed desirable in an interested view, a specious pretext never yet remained unfound;”5—and “when they have once said what they think convenient, how untruly soever, they proceed to do what they judge will be profitable, how unjustly soever; and this men very absurdly and unreasonably would have called reason of state, to the discredit of all solid reason, and all rules of probity.”6 Statesmen have two standards of morality—a social and a political standard. Political morality embraces all crimes; except, indeed, that it has that technical virtue which requires that he who may kill a hundred men with bullets, should not kill one with arsenic. And from this double system of morals it happens, that statesmen who have no restraint to political enormities but political expediency, are sufficiently amiable in private life. But “probity,” says
