TOPICS OF THE DAY
WAR MORALITIES.
Tun freedom from crime and disorderly conduct in our army be- fore Sebastopol, npon which Mr. Sidney Herbert lately dwelt with such well-merited emphasis, not only marks a great advance in the moral and intellectual training of the classes from which our soldiers are taken, since the last European war, but suggests doubts whether war itself has necessarily those brutalizing tendencies which are popularly attributed to its processes, even by those who by no means coincide in the extreme doctrine that it is never justi- fiable except as a measure of immediate self-defence. Such doubts are considerably strengthened by a perusal of the letters written by privates and non-commissioned officers from the seat of war to their friends at home ; in which it would be difficult to say whether a brave endurance of discomfort, an heroic exultation in dangers faced and overcome, or a kindly flow of home-affections, were the most striking characteristics. That which calls forth in those engaged in it courage, endurance, sagacity, promptness in resource, pre- 'knee of mind, seff-control, and contempt of death—which knits tngether officers and men by the strong ties of mutual respect and admiration, by the sense of dangers shared and services rendered, by the tenderness and sympathy elicited towards the sick and wounded—can hardly be in itself the wholly evil thing popular opinion is accustomed in our day to regard it, unless we are pre- pared to adopt the Epicurean sentiment which would make com- fort the chief good, and pain
"The something in the world mini, To be unriddled by and bye."
Then again, if we look at home, and ask what the war does for us who share none of its dangers and horrors, can any man venture to assert that a bloodthirsty feeling, a savage delight in slaughter, is the passion that just now predominates in the public) mind ? Is it not, on the contrary, a profound sense of the admirable qualities and individual worth of each man of those classes which commerce and domestic politics have such a strong tendency to reduce to " the masses"? is it not a feeling, far deeper than at other times, of the
nobility of men with strong arms and hearts to use them aright--a practieal conviction, not so familiar as it ought to be, that the
men of our land are its strength and its pride ? That, surely, can hardly be in itself a wholly bad thing which calls out such feelings, which arouses a perfectly unaffected gratitude and ad. miration for the qualities of a class too often treated with genuine indifference, or with respect only affected for selfish and ambitious aims, and binds together all classes by common sentiment, common purposes, mutual dependence, and the manifestations of a real na- tional unity of interest and feeling, generally hidden under super- ficial differences of opinion. It can hardly be a pure evil which serves as the occasion for such a spectacle as that reported last week, of the inmates of a reformatory institution, pariahs and outcasts from society, starving themselves voluntarily for a day to send the value of their food to the Patriotic Fund, and thus by an act of self-sacrifice, the moral sublimity of which it is hard for a comfortable man to appreciate properly, making good their right to share in the common sentiment of English citizens. We say nothing of the immense fund raised by voluntary sub- scription for the support of the widows and orphans of soldiers ; we say nothing of Miss Nightingale and her devoted sister- hood ; because Englishmen are never backward with their money for objects of charity, and many an Englishwoman spends her energies and 'sacrifices her comforts and her natural de- licacy in seeking out the haunts of misery and destitution; though such acts done upon a large scale, and on a stage at which the world is gazing, react with marvellous effect upon the sympathies of all who witness them, and are among the mightiest forces which bind man to man and nation to nation. True, all these facts, in proving that war is the occasion of much good, do not prove that it is not in itself an evil: and unquestion- ably, if men were perfect, wars would cease. But the question really is, whether, men being what they are, wars are not among the modes of human activity by which man's spirit is trained to perfection, and the ancient throne of wrong and sensuality, 'of weakness and cowardice, even of mere brute-force worship, made to totter to its fall. True, unlike the conflicts man wages with nature, in war he stands opposed to his fellow man, and its imme- diate object, or rather its means of action, is the destruction of human life and the works of human industry. But if nature, or more pro- perly speaking the operations of Providence in nature, be our guide in this matter, it is not thence we can draw the moral that evil is to be encountered and good sought only on the condition of net destroying the lives or the works of men. We humbly trust, and we are learning clearly to perceive, that the pestilence that walketh by noonday and smiteth its thousands in our cities is sent on a mission of healing—sent expressly to reveal to slothful and careless men the existence of laws of health, the neglect of which is entailing incessant loss of life and de:- terioration of human and animal powers. The plague smiteth fiercely, but with a passing blow : if we learn our lesson, its good effects last for ever. Men are fallible, and God is all- wise, it may be answered ' • and men must not assume to imitate the awful agencies of their Maker, because they cannot be
sure that they will use them aright. To which we reply, that man must act by the best light he has, and that powers given to him are lawfully used if used with a righteous purpose ; and that when other means of suppressing wrong have been tried in vain, we have no alternative but to let wrong prevail, or to meet and con- quer it by armed force. This appears to us a perfectly conclusive argument against banishing war from among the legitimate means of resisting evil. Mere destruction is no more the real and ultimate object of war than it is of Arctic expeditions, or other noble
enterprises in which life is risked. The real object of all justifiable war is to secure the triumph of what is assumed to be right, where human ingenuity has failed to apply the agency of law, and that combined force of all against one which is the strength of law. Nor could the theorists who condemn war, irre- respective of its cause and motive, find it easy either to "justify the ways of God to men," or to approve of any of those enterprises in which life is staked against success ; for surely men are no less bound to regard their own lives as sacred than those of others. How, too, will they justify, if they really attempt to justify, capi- tal punishment, or any punishment that inflicts bodily pain or injures health ? Even the ordinary social mechanism, if strictly probed, the common occupations of man, the systems of labour which accumulate wealth at the expense of the health and vigour of the labourers, would scarcely stand the consistent application of the Peace theory. Upon the whole, it would appear, looking to these considerations, that the common sentiment about war and those engaged in it needs some revision. Men naturally abhor blood and wounds. pain and mutilated limbs, and regard with instinctive awe the departure of the spirit from its home of flesh,—an awe that is vastly deep- ened when such separation is sudden and violent. May such ab- horrence never be less ; may such awe never cease to guard with its mysterious sanction the sacred life of man! But if man is sent into this world not to eat, sleep, and enjoy the banquet of the senses, but to vanquish the evil that is in himself and in the world—if no effort, no sacrifice of comfort and even of happiness, is too great so he only ac- complish the end of his existence—if we honour by univer- sal acclaim the man who for right and truth exposes his own life—by what logic does that become evil in a nation which in the individual is honour and virtue ? We must meet and con- quer evil in the form it happens to take; and if one of those forms be an armed host working wrong either by its own spontaneous impulse or at the bidding of a master, what new law comes into operation, whereby we are prevented from exposing oar lives in this conflict as righteously as we expose them in conflict with the winds and waters in our search after scientific truth, or for the produce of distant regions to minister to our needs and luxuries ? It seems to us to come to this, that wag is one among the various agencies by which: man's will, has to meet and conquer evil ; and that, like all those agencies, it may be either a noble discipline or a degrading and brutalizing excite- ment of the passions. Which it will be in any ease, depends much on the motives of the nation which wages it, on the general tone of morality among its people. If a nation holds its material power as a trust, and if its duties towards its ownpeople have not been miserably neglected, war becomes in the hands of such a nation a Divine instrument of justice, and the men who carry it on are sub- limed into the conscious ministers of eternal right. Only a tho- roughly materialistic misinterpretation of Christianity, a general epicureanism of habit, and confused notions about what' deter- mines the eternal wellbeing of man, could ever have led to such monstrous doctrines as we hear propounded in reference to War. We turn from such theories to the facts, and find war evoking all that is noblest and most manly in a nation, making heroes of peasants and of idlers, hushing the mean jar of faction except among the basest of mankind, and stirring in the universal heart of a people a strange delightful sense of brotherhood and unity. And if, startled by such results from what we are taught to consider an unmixed evil, we begin anew to examine the theories, they resolve themselves into principles which if duly carried out would deliver over man to the dominion of evil without resist- ance, would postpone every noble motive and high impuhie to the base love of a life that would no longer be divine because divorced from the idea of the good, and would soon end immaking men the slaves of circumstance and the bondsmen of the brutes of the forest. Surely the old Pagans and Jews had a nobler ideal than this of our modern quietists : if manhood, virtua, was then too exclusively seen in the strong arm and brave heart, at least these are the ground of all other excellences in a man, and a good Christian can no more be a coward or materialist than he can be a drunkard and a thief. Women retain their instinctive sense of the truth in this matter, and we hold that the qualities in a man which a true woman admires are those which God and nature intended him to have. Let us cease, then, to concede to our Brights and Sturges the platform from which they declaim. War has its horrors—so has cotton-spinning, so has every noble and useful enterprise—just because every such enterprise is a
new conflict with evil, and evil fights a hard fight, and exacta toil and groans and blood before it quits its hold. But to redeem the
world from evil is man's mission here ; and never is evil more gloriously defeated than when armed nations rise indignant against incarnate wrong that has gathered head, sweep away the obstruction to the world's progress, and demean themselves the while as the consecrated servants of right and truth.
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