A revolting thought, perhaps some of you will say! Have all the efforts of countless generations of good and holy men to seek peace and ensue it, resulted in no greater success than this? Let us have the courage to face facts and answer boldly, Yes; for be very sure that no piety of aspiration can dignify nor excuse the moral cowardice that seeks to evade them. You know that late in the 17th century a company of worthy and excellent men formed the settlement of Pennsylvania in North America. They were members of the Society of Friends, who would have nothing to do with war, and consequently bought their lands from the Indians instead of taking them by force or fraud. Frugal, thrifty and industrious, they soon grew wealthy, and extended their borders further and further, until they came into collision with other tribes of Indians, who one day fell upon the outlying settlers with fire and sword. In utter dismay the sufferers appealed to the Government of the province for protection; but the Colonial Assembly would not do violence to their tenets and ignored the appeal, leaving their unhappy and inoffensive frontiersmen to be massacred. At length, goaded to desperation, the settlers came down to Philadelphia with their arms in their hands, and threatened violence unless the Assembly voted money, for supply of ammunition, and other measures of defence forthwith. Thereupon the Assembly yielded, but still they would not openly pass a vote for the purchase of gunpowder. To save their conscience they voted money only for the purchase of corn or other grain, which, as gunpowder is made up of grains, was sufficient warrant for the acquisition of the necessary but unspeakable article. To such contemptible subterfuge are men driven who refuse to face facts. I understand the feelings of those who deplore that the government of human society should rest ultimately upon force, but I have no patience with those who pretend that it does not. It can profit no man to be obliged so to shape the actions of his life that they may square with a fundamental lie.
Accepting then the fact—for such I believe it to be—that the law of nations is the law of force, let us waste no time in lamentations. In the first place they are useless; and in the second they seem to me highly presumptuous; for what are we, or what is our knowledge, that we should aspire to correct the course of this world's governance? Let us rather consider what is meant by the word force, as an element in the conflict of communities. Force, in the human creature, is of two kinds, moral and physical; and in war, as Napoleon himself said, the moral is to the physical as four to one. What is this moral force? It is an indefinable consciousness of superiority. And whence does it arise? I must summon a poet to help me with my answer.
"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power."
Self-reverence, which can be based only upon high aspirations and high ideals; self-knowledge, which combines the courage to face facts, the patience to accept them, the constancy to turn them to good account; self-control, the offspring of self-denial and self-discipline. We are too much inclined to think of war as a matter of combats, demanding above all things physical courage. It is really a matter of fasting and thirsting; of toiling and waking; of lacking and enduring; which demands above all things moral courage. Yet let us hasten to add that, without bodily soundness and strength to resist privation, hardship and fatigue, an army is naught. And here we strike the peculiarity which makes war the true touch-stone of nations. It is the supreme test of their merits and demerits both moral and physical. By a community's art, literature, science and philosophy you may take the measure of its intellectual attainments; through its administrative institutions and laws you may form some judgment of its political intelligence; from the bodily structure and condition of its citizens you may form conclusions as to its physical fitness; but of the general soundness of the body politic, of the capacity of its leaders, of the devotion of their followers, of the moral force which inspires all ages and both sexes to endure hardship and sorrow with cheerfulness, and to meet adversity with confidence unshaken and with courage undaunted—for all this the trial of all trials is war.
Military history is the history of these trials. Does it seem to you a small, or ignoble, or unprofitable thing? But, it may be objected, this is an unfair way of putting the matter. No doubt it may be profitable to compare the political institutions of some effete community with those of the young, virile and vigorous communities which swept it out of existence. But the details of fire and sword, of massacre and devastation, of the blood of men and the tears of women, are they profitable? And the elaborate principles of strategy and tactics—that is to say the bringing of the armed force up to the field of decision, and the handling of it to the best advantage when there; with their ancillary sciences of fortification and poliorketics, that is to say, of setting up strong places and knocking them down again—are they profitable? What are the art of war and the science of military organisation but the art and science of destruction? Can the study of these be profitable?
Let us clear our minds of cant. What is the economy of this world, so far as we have eyes to see and intellects to understand it, but destruction and renewal, destruction and renewal? And it is really impossible, except by our petty human standards, to distinguish the one from the other. I have seen—and perhaps some of you may have seen the like—what we call a desert, of a thousand square miles of pumice-stone. This pumice-stone is a layer which varies from six to fifteen feet in depth; and below it lie the trunks of gigantic trees, all black and charred, which were scathed and overthrown by the same terrific volcanic explosion which afterwards buried them in pumice. The soil must have been fertile to raise such trees; and men lament the destruction which has made so large an area into a waste. But what they mean by destruction and waste is simply the change which has rendered it useless, so far as they can see, for purposes of producing food and exchangeable commodities immediately to the profit of men—that and nothing more. Whether it be destruction or renewal in the scheme of nature we cannot tell. But let us pass to the works of man, the great destroyer. What does a field of corn mean but that the plants which originally grew there have been ruthlessly destroyed to make way for those that better suit the purposes of man, and that an unknown quantity of animal life, dependent upon the plants so destroyed, has perished with them? What does a herd of cattle in a field mean but the destruction of all wild cattle, till these became tame enough to await their turn of destruction for the service of man? And as with plants and the inferior animals, so does man deal with man. He endeavours to destroy those that do not suit his purpose, and to replace them by others. And this he does by many other methods besides those which we group under the name of war. Within the memory of living men there were many excellent but simple gentlemen who thought that what is called Free Trade would soon be adopted by every civilised country in the world, and that then wars would cease. The prediction has not been verified, nor can I see that the world would be very much the better if it had been. For commerce is not, as is generally supposed, a peaceful pursuit. What does successful commerce mean? The under-selling of competitors; which means in turn cheaper production than is possible to competitors. But cheap production, other things being equal, depends in these days chiefly upon two things—cheap labour, which means low wages, and the best of machinery. Who can tell how many lives have been sacrificed to low wages in the winning of any commercial competition; or how many men, women and children have been starved when machinery, either absolutely or practically new, has driven a mass of bread-winners out of employment? And these are the casualties only on the victorious side. What have they been on the beaten side, when whole industries have been ruined? If we could arrive at a just estimate of the casualty lists filled by commerce, I doubt greatly if they would be lower than those filled by war. Improved machinery, in the case of a great many manufactures, is as truly an engine of destruction as a torpedo or a heavy gun. It is meant to destroy other competing machinery and to drive its workmen from it, just as a torpedo is meant to destroy a ship and send its crew to the bottom. A town deserted and falling to ruin owing to loss of trade and consequent loss of population, is as truly destroyed as if it had been battered to pieces by shot and shell.
This, it may be said, is an unkind way of stating the matter. The superior machinery supplants and replaces the inferior. Quite so. There is in a general way renewal as well as destruction; but the superior machinery does not replace the men who have perished in assuring its triumph on the one side, or in succumbing to that triumph on the other. And after all what is the general purport of war but to replace what is inferior by what is superior? What are the rise and fall of civilisations, empires, states, nations and communities, but the process of supplanting the inferior by the superior, or at any rate the subjection of the inferior to the superior? Military history is the history of that process, and it is no more the history of destruction than any other kind of history. I do not suppose that the most tender-hearted member of the Society of Friends would take exception to the study of the legislative enactments whereby, quite apart from warlike measures, we wrested their former commercial superiority from the Dutch. He would not call it a history of destruction, and yet it was so—to the Dutch. In the case of a military war the casualty lists are published, and everyone says "How shocking." In the case of a commercial war it is announced that such and such a firm has closed its works through bankruptcy; and few, unless they chance to be share-holders, think more about the matter. There may be some hundreds of people deprived of their livelihood, but few consider that. Military victors feed their prisoners of war: commercial victors leave them to starve. And yet commerce is held to be humane, and war very much the contrary; while captains of industry are held in honour by men to whom the fame of a captain in war gives sincere and conscientious affliction.
Thus you see how futile, however well-intended, are peace-societies and similar institutions, inasmuch as they recognise only one description—the military—of war. It is terrible to think how true is the saying of Erasmus, Homo homini lupus. We like to be successful ourselves, and we like our friends to be successful also, but we seldom reflect that every success is won at the cost of another's failure. Even here in Cambridge, and among those merriest of mortals, undergraduates, the stern inexorable law asserts itself. For one whom a class-list makes happy, how many does it make miserable? For one to whom it offers the prospect of food and warmth, to how many does it threaten cold and want? Homo homini lupus, that is individual history. Gentes gentibus lupi, that is universal history.