Volume I Part 3 (1/2)
Our country is singularly dest.i.tute of public libraries. You must go across the ocean to read the history of the Church or State; all the public libraries in America cannot furnish the books referred to in Gibbon's Rome, or Gieseler's History of the Church. I think there is no public library in Europe which has cost three dollars a volume. There are six: the Vatican, at Rome; the Royal, at Paris; the British Museum, at London; the Bodleian, at Oxford; the University Libraries at Gottingen and Berlin--which contain, it is said, about 4,500,000 volumes. The recent grant of $17,000,000 for the army is $3,500,000 more than the cost of those magnificent collections!
There have been printed about 3,000,000 different volumes, great and little, within the last 400 years. If the Florida war cost but $30,000,000, it is ten times more than enough to have purchased one copy of each book ever printed, at one dollar a volume, which is more than the average cost.
Now all these sums are to be paid by the people, ”the dear people,” whom our republican demagogues love so well, and for whom they spend their lives, rising early, toiling late, those self-denying heroes, those sainted martyrs of the republic, eating the bread of carefulness for them alone! But how are they to be paid? By a direct tax levied on all the property of the nation, so that the poor man pays according to his little, and the rich man in proportion to his much, each knowing when he pays and what he pays for? No such thing; nothing like it. The people must pay and not know it; must be deceived a little, or they would not pay after this fas.h.i.+on! You pay for it in every pound of sugar, copper, coal, in every yard of cloth; and if the counsel of some lovers of the people be followed, you will soon pay for it in each pound of coffee and tea. In this way the rich man always pays relatively less than the poor; often a positively smaller sum. Even here I think that three-fourths of all the property is owned by one-fourth of the people, yet that three-fourths by no means pays a third of the national revenue. The tax is laid on things men cannot do without,--sugar, cloth, and the like.
The consumption of these articles is not in proportion to wealth but persons. Now the poor man, as a general rule, has more children than the rich, and the tax being more in proportion to persons than property, the poor man pays more than the rich. So a tax is really laid on the poor man's children to pay for the war which makes him poor and keeps him poor. I think your captains and colonels, those sons of thunder and heirs of glory, will not tell you so. They tell you so! They know it!
Poor brothers, how could they? I think your party newspapers, penny or pound, will not tell you so; nor the demagogues, all covered with glory and all forlorn, who tell the people when to hurrah and for what! But if you cipher the matter out for yourself you will find it so, and not otherwise. Tell the demagogues, whig or democrat, that. It was an old Roman maxim, ”The people wished to be deceived; let them.” Now it is only practised on; not repeated--in public.
Let us deal justly even with war, giving that its due. There is one cla.s.s of men who find their pecuniary advantage in it. I mean army contractors, when they chance to be favorites of the party in power; men who let steamboats to lie idle at $500 a day. This cla.s.s of men rejoice in a war. The country may become poor, they are sure to be rich. Yet another cla.s.s turn war to account, get the ”glory,” and become important in song and sermon. I see it stated in a newspaper that the Duke of Wellington has received, as gratuities for his military services, $5,400,000, and $40,000 a year in pensions!
But the waste of property is the smallest part of the evil. The waste of life in war is yet more terrible. Human life is a sacred thing. Go out into the lowest street of Boston; take the vilest and most squalid man in that miserable lane, and he is dear to some one. He is called brother; perhaps husband; it may be father; at least, son. A human heart, sadly joyful, beat over him before he was born. He has been pressed fondly to his mother's arms. Her tears and her smiles have been for him; perhaps also her prayers. His blood may be counted mean and vile by the great men of the earth who love nothing so well as the dear people, for he has no ”coat of arms,” no liveried servant to attend him, but it has run down from the same first man. His family is ancient as that of the most long descended king. G.o.d made him; made this splendid universe to wait on him and teach him; sent his Christ to save him. He is an immortal soul. Needlessly to spill that man's blood is an awful sin. It will cry against you out of the ground--Cain! where is thy brother? Now in war you bring together 50,000 men like him on one side, and 50,000 of a different nation on the other. They have no natural quarrel with one another. The earth is wide enough for both; neither hinders the sun from the other. Many come unwillingly; many not knowing what they fight for. It is but accident that determines on which side the man shall fight. The cannons pour their shot--round, grape, canister; the howitzers scatter their bursting sh.e.l.ls; the muskets rain their leaden death; the sword, the bayonet, the horses' iron hoof, the wheels of the artillery, grind the men down into trodden dust. There they lie, the two ma.s.ses of burning valor, extinguished, quenched, and grimly dead, each covering with his body the spot he defended with his arms. They had no quarrel; yet they lie there, slain by a brother's hand. It is not old and decrepid men, but men of the productive age, full of l.u.s.ty life.
But it is only the smallest part that perish in battle. Exposure to cold, wet, heat; unhealthy climates, unwholesome food, rum, and forced marches, bring on diseases which mow down the poor soldiers worse than musketry and grape. Others languish of wounds, and slowly procrastinate a dreadful and a tenfold death. Far away, there are widows, orphans, childless old fathers, who pore over the daily news to learn at random the fate of a son, a father, or a husband! They crowd disconsolate into the churches, seeking of G.o.d the comfort men took from them, praying in the bitterness of a broken heart, while the priest gives thanks for ”a famous victory,” and hangs up the b.l.o.o.d.y standard over his pulpit!
When ordinary disease cuts off a man, when he dies at his duty, there is some comfort in that loss. ”It was the ordinance of G.o.d,” you say. You minister to his wants; you smoothe down the pillow for the aching head; your love beguiles the torment of disease, and your own bosom gathers half the darts of death. He goes in his time and G.o.d takes him. But when he dies in such a war, in battle, it is man who has robbed him of life.
It is a murderer that is butchered. Nothing alleviates that bitter, burning smart!
Others not slain are maimed for life. This has no eyes; that no hands; another no feet nor legs. This has been pierced by lances, and torn with the shot, till scarce any thing human is left. The wreck of a body is crazed with pains G.o.d never meant for man. The mother that bore him would not know her child. Count the orphan asylums in Germany and Holland; go into the hospital at Greenwich, that of the invalids in Paris, you see the ”trophies” of Napoleon and Wellington. Go to the a.r.s.enal at Toulon, see the wooden legs piled up there for men now active and whole, and you will think a little of the physical horrors of war.
In Boston there are perhaps about 25,000 able-bodied men between 18 and 45. Suppose them all slain in battle, or mortally hurt, or mown down by the camp-fever, vomito, or other diseases of war, and then fancy the distress, the heart-sickness amid wives, mothers, daughters, sons and fathers, here! Yet 25,000 is a small number to be murdered in ”a famous victory;” a trifle for a whole ”glorious campaign” in a great war. The men of Boston are no better loved than the men of Tamaulipas. There is scarce an old family, of the middle cla.s.s, in all New England, which did not thus smart in the Revolution; many, which have not, to this day, recovered from the b.l.o.o.d.y blow then falling on them. Think, wives, of the butchery of your husbands; think, mothers, of the murder of your sons!
Here, too, the burden of battle falls mainly on the humble cla.s.s. They pay the great tribute of money; they pay also the horrid tax of blood.
It was not your rich men who fought even the Revolution; not they. Your men of property and standing were leaguing with the British, or fitting out privateers when that offered a good investment, or buying up the estates of more consistent tories; making money out of the nation's dire distress! True, there were most honorable exceptions; but such, I think, was the general rule. Let this be distinctly remembered, that the burden of battle is borne by the humble cla.s.ses of men; they pay the vast tribute of money; the awful tax of blood! The ”glory” is got by a few; poverty, wounds, death, are for the people!
Military glory is the poorest kind of distinction, but the most dangerous pa.s.sion. It is an honor to man to be able to mould iron; to be skilful at working in cloth, wood, clay, leather. It is man's vocation to raise corn, to subdue the rebellious fibre of cotton and convert it into beautiful robes, full of comfort for the body. They are the heroes of the race who abridge the time of human toil and multiply its results; they who win great truths from G.o.d, and send them to a people's heart; they who balance the many and the one into harmonious action, so that all are united and yet each left free. But the glory which comes of epaulets and feathers; that strutting glory which is dyed in blood--what shall we say of it? In this day it is not heroism; it is an imitation of barbarism long ago pa.s.sed by. Yet it is marvellous how many men are taken with a red coat! You expect it in Europe, a land of soldiers and blood. You are disappointed to find that here the champions of force should be held in honor, and that even the lowest should voluntarily enroll themselves as butchers of men!
Yet more: aggressive war is a sin; a corruption of the public morals. It is a practical denial of Christianity; a violation of G.o.d's eternal law of love. This is so plain that I shall say little upon it to-day. Your savagest and most vulgar captain would confess he does not fight as a Christian--but as a soldier; your magistrate calls for volunteers--not as a man loving Christianity, and loyal to G.o.d; only as Governor, under oath to keep the Const.i.tution, the tradition of the elders; not under oath to keep the commandment of G.o.d! In war the laws are suspended, violence and cunning rule everywhere. The battle of Yorktown was gained by a lie, though a Was.h.i.+ngton told it. As a soldier it was his duty. Men ”emulate the tiger;” the hand is b.l.o.o.d.y, and the heart hard. Robbery and murder are the rule, the glory of men. ”Good men look sad, but ruffians dance and leap.” Men are systematically trained to burn towns, to murder fathers and sons; taught to consider it ”glory” to do so. The Government collects ruffians and cut-throats. It compels better men to serve with these and become cut-throats. It appoints chaplains to blaspheme Christianity; teaching the ruffians how to pray for the destruction of the enemy, the burning of his towns; to do this in the name of Christ and G.o.d. I do not censure all the men who serve: some of them know no better; they have heard that a man would ”perish everlastingly” if he did not believe the Athanasian creed; that if he questioned the story of Jonah, or the miraculous birth of Jesus, he was in danger of h.e.l.l-fire, and if he doubted d.a.m.nation was sure to be d.a.m.ned. They never heard that such a war was a sin; that to create a war was treason, and to fight in it wrong. They never thought of thinking for themselves; their thinking was to read a newspaper, or sleep through a sermon. They counted it their duty to obey the Government without thinking if that Government be right or wrong. I deny not the n.o.ble, manly character of many a soldier, his heroism, self-denial and personal sacrifice.
Still, after all proper allowance is made for a few individuals, the whole system of war is unchristian and sinful. It lives only by evil pa.s.sions. It can be defended only by what is low, selfish, and animal.
It absorbs the sc.u.m of the cities, pirates, robbers, murderers. It makes them worse, and better men like them. To take one man's life is murder; what is it to practise killing as an art, a trade; to do it by thousands? Yet I think better of the hands that do the butchering than of the ambitious heads, the cold, remorseless hearts, which plunge the nation into war.
In war the State teaches men to lie, to steal, to kill. It calls for privateers, who are commonly pirates with a national charter, and pirates are privateers with only a personal charter. Every camp is a school of profanity, violence, licentiousness, and crimes too foul to name. It is so without sixty-five thousand gallons of whiskey. This is unavoidable. It was so with Was.h.i.+ngton's army, with Cornwallis's, with that of Gustavus Adolphus, perhaps the most moral army the world ever saw. The soldier's life generally unfits a man for the citizen's! When he returns from a camp, from a war, back to his native village, he becomes a curse to society and a shame to the mother that bore him. Even the soldiers of the Revolution, who survived the war, were mostly ruined for life, debauched, intemperate, vicious and vile. What loathsome creatures so many of them were! They bore our burden, for such were the real martyrs of that war, not the men who fell under the shot! How many men of the rank and file in the late war have since become respectable citizens?
To show how incompatible are War and Christianity, suppose that he who is deemed the most Christian of Christ's disciples, the well-beloved John, were made a navy-chaplain, and some morning, when a battle is daily looked for, should stand on the gun-deck, amid lockers of shot, his Bible resting on a cannon, and expound Christianity to men with cutla.s.ses by their side! Let him read for the morning lesson the Sermon on the Mount, and for text take words from his own Epistle, so sweet, so beautiful, so true: ”Every one that loveth is born of G.o.d, and knoweth G.o.d, for G.o.d is love.” Suppose he tells his strange audience that all men are brothers; that G.o.d is their common father; that Christ loved us all, showing us how to live the life of love; and then, when he had melted all those savage hearts by words so winsome and so true, let him conclude, ”Blessed are the men-slayers! Seek first the glory which cometh of battle. Be fierce as tigers. Mar G.o.d's image in which your brothers are made. Be not like Christ, but Cain who slew his brother!
When you meet the enemy, fire into their bosoms; kill them in the dear name of Christ; butcher them in the spirit of G.o.d. Give them no quarter, for we ought not to lay down our lives for the brethren; only the murderer hath eternal life!”
Yet great as are these three-fold evils, there are times when the soberest men and the best men have welcomed war, coolly and in their better moments. Sometimes a people, long oppressed, has ”pet.i.tioned, remonstrated, cast itself at the feet of the throne,” with only insult for answer to its prayer. Sometimes there is a contest between a falsehood and a great truth; a self-protecting war for freedom of mind, heart and soul; yes, a war for a man's body, his wife's and children's body, for what is dearer to men than life itself, for the unalienable rights of man, for the idea that all are born free and equal. It was so in the American Revolution; in the English, in the French Revolution. In such cases men say, ”Let it come.” They take down the firelock in sorrow; with a prayer they go forth to battle, asking that the Right may triumph. Much as I hate war I cannot but honor such men. Were they better, yet more heroic, even war of that character might be avoided.
Still it is a colder heart than mine which does not honor such men, though it believes them mistaken. Especially do we honor them, when it is the few, the scattered, the feeble, contending with the many and the mighty; the n.o.ble fighting for a great idea, and against the base and tyrannical. Then most men think the gain, the triumph of a great idea, is worth the price it costs, the price of blood.
I will not stop to touch that question, If man may ever shed the blood of man. But it is plain that an aggressive war like this is wholly unchristian, and a reproach to the nation and the age.
Now, to make the evils of war still clearer, and to bring them home to your door, let us suppose there was war between the counties of Suffolk, on the one side, and Middles.e.x on the other--this army at Boston, that at Cambridge. Suppose the subject in dispute was the boundary line between the two, Boston claiming a pitiful acre of flat land, which the ocean at low tide disdained to cover. To make sure of this, Boston seizes whole miles of flats, unquestionably not its own. The rulers on one side are fools, and traitors on the other. The two commanders have issued their proclamations; the money is borrowed; the whiskey provided; the soldiers--Americans, Negroes, Irishmen, all the able-bodied men--are enlisted. Prayers are offered in all the churches, and sermons preached, showing that G.o.d is a man of war, and Cain his first saint, an early Christian, a Christian before Christ. The Bostonians wish to seize Cambridge, burn the houses, churches, college-halls, and plunder the library. The men of Cambridge wish to seize Boston, burn its houses and s.h.i.+ps, plundering its wares and its goods. Martial law is proclaimed on both sides. The men of Cambridge cut asunder the bridges, and make a huge breach in the mill-dam, planting cannon to enfilade all those avenues. Forts crown the hilltops, else so green. Men, madder than lunatics, are crowded into the Asylum. The Bostonians rebuild the old fortifications on the Neck; replace the forts on Beacon-hill, Fort-hill, Copps-hill, levelling houses to make room for redoubts and bastions. The batteries are planted, the mortars got ready; the furnaces and magazines are all prepared. The three hills are grim with war. From Copps-hill men look anxious to that memorable height the other side of the water. Provisions are cut off in Boston; no man may pa.s.s the lines; the aqueduct refuses its genial supply; children cry for their expected food. The soldiers parade, looking somewhat tremulous and pale; all the able-bodied have come, the vilest most willingly; some are brought by force of drink, some by force of arms. Some are in brilliant dresses, some in their working frocks. The banners are consecrated by solemn words.[6] Your church-towers are military posts of observation.
There are Old Testament prayers to the ”G.o.d of Hosts” in all the churches of Boston; prayers that G.o.d would curse the men of Cambridge, make their wives widows, their children fatherless, their houses a ruin, the men corpses, meat for the beast of the field and the bird of the air. Last night the Bostonians made a feint of attacking Charlestown, raining bombs and red-hot cannon-b.a.l.l.s from Copps-hill, till they have burnt a thousand houses, where the British burnt not half so many. Women and children fled screaming from the blazing rafters of their homes. The men of Middles.e.x crowd into Charlestown.