The numbers sanctified the crime.
Wolves in “packs” seek prey; so do men—in sheep’s clothing. Wolves truthful, in howls, send forth their propaganda—hunger; men untruthful, in words, send forth their propaganda—hate. If the “survival of the fittest” be nature’s law only brutes conform to nature—by using no weapons. Men kill their own “kith and kin”; brutes combine to protect their own species. The more one sees of men on war’s slaughter-fields killing their friends or strangers, for prospective profit, the more he must admire the ethics of the brute. In brute history there have been no wars. Facing human record, the record of 3,400 years, there have been 3,166 years of war, and only 234 years of peace; facing the picture of which history makes no mention and which in the wake of armies she had seen, Clara Barton says: “Faces bathed in tears and hands in blood, lees in the wind and dregs in the cup of military glory, war has cost a million times more than the world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created.”
Through war and its consequences, one third of “civilized man” since the world began has come to an untimely end, by violence, as did Abel at the hands of Cain.
Earth’s remotest regions
Lie half unpeopled by the feuds of Rome.
“Mankind is the greatest mystery of all mysteries,” says Clara Barton, and insists that she can never understand the history of human conduct in this world, and wonders whether or not she will in the next. In the light of war’s history and, trying to solve the “mystery of all mysteries,” she asks: “Heavenly Father! what is the matter with this beautiful earth that thou hast made? And what is man that thou art mindful of him?”
Further philosophizing on the “Wickedness of War,” in a masterful public address, she says: “There is not a geographical boundary line on the face of the earth that was not put there by the sword, and is not practically held there by this same dread power. War actually settles no disputes, it brings no real peace; it but closes an open strife;—the peace is simply buried embers. The war side of the war could never have called me to the field—through and through, thought and act, body and soul, I hate it. We can only wait and trust for the day to come when the wickedness of war shall be a thing unknown in this beautiful world.”
Again philosophizing she says: “As I reflect upon the mighty and endless changes which must grow out of war’s issues, the subject rises up before me like some far-away mountain summit, towering peak upon peak, rock upon rock, that human foot has not trod and enveloped in a hazy mist the eye has never penetrated.”
XV
In the same year, and about the same time in the year, that Clara Barton first started for the battlefield her warm personal friend, Julia Ward Howe, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”