Luckless Squills! Little could he have foreseen the shower-bath, or rather douche, of erudition that fell splash on his head as he pulled the string with that impertinent Oh! oh! Down first came the Persian war, with Median myriads disgorging all the rivers they had drunk up in their march through the East; all the arts, all the letters, all the sciences, all the notions of liberty that we inherit from Greece,—my father rushed on with them all, sousing Squills with his proofs that without the Persian war Greece would never have risen to be the teacher of the world. Before the gasping victim could take breath, down came Hun, Goth, and Vandal on Italy and Squills.
“What, sir!” cried my father, “don’t you see that from those irruptions on demoralized Rome came the regeneration of manhood, the re-baptism of earth from the last soils of paganism, and the remote origin of whatever of Christianity yet exists free from the idolatries with which Rome contaminated the faith?”
Squills held up his hands and made a splutter. Down came Charlemagne, paladins and all! There my father was grand! What a picture he made of the broken, jarring, savage elements of barbaric society. And the iron hand of the great Frank,—settling the nations and founding existent Europe. Squills was now fast sinking into coma or stupefaction; but catching at a straw as he heard the word “Crusades,” he stuttered forth, “Ah! there I defy you.”
“Defy me there!” cries my father; and one would think the ocean was in the shower-bath, it came down with such a rattle. My father scarcely touched on the smaller points in excuse for the Crusades, though he recited very volubly all the humaner arts introduced into Europe by that invasion of the East, and showed how it had served civilization by the vent it afforded for the rude energies of chivalry, by the element of destruction to feudal tyranny that it introduced, by its use in the emancipation of burghs and the disrupture of serfdom. But he painted, in colors vivid as if caught from the skies of the East, the great spread of Mahometanism and the danger it menaced to Christian Europe, and drew up the Godfreys and Tancreds and Richards as a league of the Age and Necessity against the terrible progress of the sword and the Koran. “You call them madmen,” cried my father; “but the frenzy of nations is the statemanship of fate! How know you that—but for the terror inspired by the hosts who marched to Jerusalem—how know you that the Crescent had not waved over other realms than those which Roderic lost to the Moor? If Christianity had been less a passion, and the passion had less stirred up all Europe, how know you that the creed of the Arab (which was then, too, a passion) might not have planted its mosques in the forum of Rome and on the site of Notre Dame? For in the war between creeds,—when the creeds are embraced by vast races,—think you that the reason of sages can cope with the passion of millions? Enthusiasm must oppose enthusiasm. The crusader fought for the tomb of Christ, but he saved the life of Christendom.”
My father paused. Squills was quite passive; he struggled no more,—he was drowned.
“So,” resumed Mr. Caxton, more quietly, “so, if later wars yet perplex us as to the good that the All-wise One draws from their evils, our posterity may read their uses as clearly as we now read the finger of Providence resting on the barrows of Marathon, or guiding Peter the Hermit to the battlefields of Palestine. Nor, while we admit the evil to the passing generation, can we deny that many of the virtues that make the ornament and vitality of peace sprang up first in the convulsion of war!” Here Squills began to evince faint signs of resuscitation, when my father let fly at him one of those numberless waterworks which his prodigious memory kept in constant supply. “Hence,” said he, “hence, not unjustly has it been remarked by a philosopher, shrewd at least in worldly experience [Squills again closed his eyes, and became exanimate]: ‘It is strange to imagine that war, which of all things appears the most savage, should be the passion of the most heroic spirits. But ‘t is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn; ‘t is in war that mutual succor is most given, mutual danger run, and common affection most exerted and employed: for heroism and philanthropy are almost one and the same!’” (1)
My father ceased, and mused a little. Squills, if still living, thought it prudent to feign continued extinction.
“Not,” said Mr. Caxton, resuming, “not but what I hold it our duty never to foster into a passion what we must rather submit to as an awful necessity. You say truly, Mr. Squills,—war is an evil; and woe to those who, on slight pretences, open the gates of Janus,—
“‘The dire abode,
And the fierce issues of the furious god.’”
Mr. Squills, after a long pause,—employed in some of the more handy means for the reanimation of submerged bodies, supporting himself close to the fire in a semi-erect posture, with gentle friction, self-applied, to each several limb, and copious recourse to certain steaming stimulants which my compassionate hands prepared for him,—stretches himself and says feebly, “In short, then, not to provoke further discussion, you would go to war in defence of your country. Stop, sir, stop, for Heaven’s sake! I agree with you, I agree with you! But, fortunately, there is little chance now that any new Boney will build boats at Boulogne to invade us.”