Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address.
II. We pass next to wars of aggression against evil—and the lecturer spends powerful pages on the selfishness and faithlessness of ambitious warlike kings; on the common degradation of the idea of power; and on the need for concentrating all our energies on home reforms. We are warned against supposing that a big nation is a strong one, bade to aim at union of hearts rather. “Only that nation gains true territory which gains itself.” “A nation,” he proceeds, “does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit.” “Whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting.”[102]
He nevertheless believes that the rule of England is for the good of the subject races, is a national duty and a piece of self-sacrifice and world service, the English white man’s burden. He has an eloquent passage on this subject in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, beginning “Reign or die.” His hostility to the Manchester School comes out in his characteristic style. “I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only malignant, but dastardly.” “Within these last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive, where we should not have been passive, for fear.”[103] I am indeed much afraid that this, spoken in 1865, has generally been the case throughout our history.
III. As to wars for defence: Ruskin principally devotes himself to attacking the essential slavery of military obedience: he will have no mercenary standing armies, only unprofessional citizen armies for defence.
So he ends with fatherly counsel to his hearers to be industrious and serious minded, not to bet, to be pure and honourable, and reverent towards all women; and the ladies present he exhorts to wear black whenever there is war, that so, by their influence, there may be no more wars.
There you have a summary of the famous lecture on War in the Crown of Wild Olive, which has weakened Ruskin’s influence with many of his friends, and done undoubted harm. But I call it on the whole a peace address given by a man who combined with his hatred of violence and ruin a certain attachment to picturesque mediævalism. The wars of Arthur or Roland were his ideal. He recognized the heroism and self-abandonment of such soldiers as he had read about all his life in Homer and Scott. But our modern wars include everything he hated; they are wars for trade and for gain, sordid and financial in origin and sordid and financial in results.
Ruskin explains his attitude quite clearly in the Appendix to the Crown of Wild Olive, at the beginning of his notes on the Political Economy of the Kings of Prussia.
“I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.
“When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of avoidable human suffering and that it ought to cease among Christian nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful characters yet developed among men have been formed in war—that all great nations have been warrior nations—and that the only kinds of peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to the intellect and the heart.
“The last lecture in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government, was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.