As regards the rights and wrongs of making war, Newman asks, "Why does one murder make a villain, but the murder of thousands a hero?" And again, "Why do princes and statesmen, who would scorn to steal a shilling, make no difficulty in stealing a kingdom?"
Before calling this, as many an Englishman would not hesitate to do, a topsy-turvy morality, let us realize that sayings such as these really give us the true values of things as nothing else could. For there are more sins "in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in a nation's classified immoralities. Stealing a shilling is a recognized immorality, and as such the law of the land punishes the thief. Stealing a kingdom, however, is one of those national achievements which men justify to themselves as a patriotic feat, or, it may be, a necessity of empire, and it is not classified among punishable offences at all. And then it is necessary to remember that many things that are indefensible when only a few do them, seem to become, by an extraordinary method of reasoning, regarded as allowable when so many people do them that a spurious public opinion and a decadent fashion is born, which shelters them and prevents the light of an unbiassed judgment from showing up their shortcomings in morality. One has only to read up old records of the eighteenth century to see how slavery flourished in England among otherwise honourable men, and how public opinion condoned, nay, justified it to realize that public opinion regarded as vox populi, is often many spiritual leagues away from being vox Dei.
Newman's point of view regarding war and extension of territory was not the popular one:—
"There are many who believe that the time will come when no weapons of war shall be forged, and universal peace shall reign…. We also believe that a time will come when men will look back in wonder and pity on our present barbarism; a time at which to begin a war—unless previously justified by the verdict of an impartial tribunal, bound in honour to overlook what is partially expedient to their own nation or party—will be esteemed a high and dreadful crime.
"The 'Governments' will never initiate such institutions until compelled by public opinion and by the inevitable pressure of circumstances, nor is any nation in the world yet ripe to put forth such pressure; otherwise it would not be difficult to devise a supreme court, or rather jury, which would put a totally new moral aspect on war." [Footnote: Ethics of War, Francis W. Newman.]
He goes on to say that a great many wars might have been avoided by us if we had been willing, which we are not, to submit to arbitration; and he urges that war should be "declared in the Capital… with the formal assent of Lords and Commons."
Under the present system, as he points out, when war is declared against any country, it is not a necessity, as it was in the fourteenth century, that Parliament should be applied to for consent and approval when the King of England wished to make war. Later, Henry V asked Parliament what it would advise in "matters of foreign embroilment"; and when the King of France wanted to make peace with him, he would do nothing in the matter until his Parliament had told him "what will be most profitable and honourable to do in the matter."
But to-day, in arranging to make war or to make peace, it is the Cabinet— the two or three in the inner Chamber—who take all responsibility upon themselves. As often as not their decision is largely influenced by party questions—and the questions do not depend on the morality of the war, whether the reason for it is a just one or no. "It is the singular disgrace of modern England, [Footnote: Deliberations before War, Francis Newman, 1859.] to have allowed the solemn responsibility of war to be tampered with by the arbitrary judgment of executive officers; … the nation permits war to be made, lives by the twenty thousand or fifty thousand to be sacrificed, provinces to be confiscated, and permanent empire over foreign subjects established, at the secret advice of a Cabinet, all of one party, acting collectively for party objects, no one outside knowing how each has voted." Yet "the whole nation is implicated in a war, when once it is undertaken, inasmuch as we all have the same national disgrace, if it is unjust; the same suffering, if it is tedious; the same loss, if it is expensive"; and all the time, "according to the current morality of Christendom, two nations may be engaged in deadly struggle, and neither be in the wrong."
Newman attributes this present method of deciding war or peace by means of the Cabinet, rather than the voice of the people as expressed by their representatives in assembled Parliament, to the "anomaly of the East Indian Empire." Then, when the Board of Control was formed in 1784, "the orders to make, or not to make war, went out direct from the Board of Control; that is, really, from the ministry in Downing Street. Two, or even one, resolute man had power to make war without check." The fatal war with Afghanistan in the eighteen-thirties which cost us so dear in the matter of men and fame, was settled in England by "secret orders of two or three executive officers of the Queen, without previous debate in Parliament." It is necessary to remember, when thinking of the barbarisms which war brought in its train, not a hundred years ago, that what Newman calls, very justly, "the atrocious system" of paying our soldiers and sailors head-money for the numbers killed by them, was only done away with about sixty years ago.
But it is impossible even to touch here upon the unthinkable miseries which are inevitably suffered by thousands of innocent men, women, and children whenever that Barbarism of Civilization, War, marches through a land. Apart from all the devastation that marks its advent, no one can know how indescribably far the real moral and industrial progress of civilization is retarded by even what we consider a small war. As Newman says: "No one can wonder at the rise and progress of an opinion that war is essentially an immoral state."