The Scandinavian scholar, Jespersen.
If the processes of war are primitive, the causes of war are no less so. It has been strikingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar that "language was born in the courting-days of mankind: the first utterance of speech <was> something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two cock-pheasants for the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the hell-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the noblest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature. Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, consecration to country, fine words all, fine things, but so many of the men who represent these fine things perish. It wrings the heart at a distance of more than thirty years to think of those who have fallen, and love still maintains passionately that they were the best. At any rate, they were among the best, and both sides are feeling the loss to this day, not only in the men themselves, but in the sons that should have been born to them.
Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient number of resemblances, in killed, wounded, and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, or, if you choose to give it a milder name, rivalry. These things are of the essence of war, and the manifestations run parallel even in the finer lines. One cock-pheasant finds the drumming of another cock-pheasant a very irritating sound, Chanticleer objects to the note of Chanticleer, and the more articulate human being is rasped by the voice of his neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad Bœotian speech. Parson Evans's "seese and putter" were the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's dose of humiliation. "Yankee twang" and "Southern drawl" incited as well as echoed hostility.
Ach. 527.
Borderers are seldom friends. "An Attic neighbor" is a Greek proverb. Kentucky and Ohio frown at each other across the river. Cincinnati looks down on Covington, and Covington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian war to a kidnapping affair between Athens and Megara. The underground railroad preceded the aboveground railroad in the history of the great American conflict.
There were jealousies enough between Athens and Sparta in the olden times, which correspond to our colonial days, and in the Persian war, which was in a sense the Greek war of independence. In like manner the chronicles of our Revolutionary period show that there was abundance of bad blood between Northern colonies and Southern colonies. The Virginian planter whom all have agreed to make the one national hero was after all a Virginian, and Virginians have not forgotten the impatient utterances of the "imperial man" on the soil of Massachusetts and in the streets of New York. Nobody takes Knickerbocker's History of New York seriously, as owlish historians are wont to take Aristophanes. Why not? We accept the hostility of Attica and Bœotia, of Attica and Megara; and there are no more graphic chapters than those which set forth the enmity between New York and Maryland, between New Amsterdam and Connecticut.
The Peloponnesians called it the Attic War (Thuc. 5, 28, 3); the Ionians the Doric War. In a recent number of the Jahrbücher, xxxv, No. 2 (1915), there is a discussion of the name of the Peloponnesian War apropos of the present "World-war," or, if you choose, "Wirrwarr." For our war the misnomer "The Civil War" has been adopted as the official designation.
Business is often more potent than blood. Nullification, the forerunner of disunion, rose from a question of tariff. The echoes had not died out when I woke to conscious life. I knew that I was the son of a nullifier, and the nephew of a Union man. It was whispered that our beloved family physician found it prudent to withdraw from the public gaze for a while, and that my uncle's windows were broken by the palmettoes of a nullification procession; and I can remember from my boyhood days how unreconciled citizens of Charleston shook their fists at the revenue cutter and its "foreign flag." Such an early experience enables one to understand our war better. It enables one to understand the Peloponnesian war better, the struggle between the union of which Athens was the mistress and the confederacy of which Sparta was the head. Non-intercourse between Athens and Megara was the first stage. The famous Megarian decree of Pericles, which closed the market of Athens to Megarians, gave rise to angry controversy, and the refusal to rescind that decree led to open war. But Megara was little more than a pretext. The subtle influence of Corinth was potent. The great merchant city of Greece dreaded the rise of Athens to dominant commercial importance, and in the conflict between the Corinthian brass and the Attic clay, the clay was shattered. Corinth does not show her hand much in the Peloponnesian war. She figures at the beginning, and then disappears. But the old mole is at work the whole time, and what the Peloponnesians called the Attic war, and the Attics the Peloponnesian war, might have been called the Corinthian war. The exchange, the banking-house, were important factors then as now. "Sinews of war" is a classical expression. The popular cry of "Persian gold" was heard in the Peloponnesian war as the popular cry of "British gold" is heard now.
True, there was no slavery question in the Peloponnesian war, for antique civilization without slavery is hardly thinkable; but after all, the slavery question belongs ultimately to the sphere of economics. The humanitarian spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was at work in the Southern States as in the Northern States, but it was hampered by economic considerations. Virginia, as every one knows, was on the verge of becoming a free State. Colonization flourished in my boyhood. A friend of my father's left him trustee for his "servants," as we called them. They were quartered opposite our house in Charleston, and the pickaninnies were objects of profound interest to the children of the neighborhood. One or two letters came from the emigrants after they reached Liberia. Then silence fell on the African farm.
Some of the most effective anti-slavery reformers were Charlestonians by birth and breeding. I cannot say that Grimké was a popular name, but homage was paid to the talent of Frederick, as I remember only too well, for I had to learn a speech of his by heart, as a schoolboy exercise. But the economic conditions of the South were not favorable to the spread of the ideas represented by the Grimkés. The slavery question kept alive the spirit that manifested itself in the tariff question. State rights were not suffered to slumber. The Southerner resented Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedæmonian dictation, and our Peloponnesian war began.