Charles Sumner
Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable? The true honor of a nation is conspicuous only in deeds of justice and beneficence, securing and advancing human happiness. In the clear eye of that Christian judgment which must yet prevail, vain are the victories of war, infamous its spoils. He is the benefactor, and worthy of honor, who carries comfort to wretchedness, dries the tear of sorrow, relieves the unfortunate, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, does justice, enlightens the ignorant, unfastens the fetters of the slave, and finally, by virtuous genius, in art, literature, science, enlivens and exalts the hours of life, or by generous example, inspires a love for God and man. This is the Christian hero; this is the man of honor in a Christian land. He is no benefactor, nor worthy of honor, whatever his worldly renown, whose life is absorbed in feats of brute force, who renounces the great law of Christian brotherhood, whose vocation is blood.
Fellow-citizens, this criminal and impious custom of war, which all condemn in the case of individuals, is openly avowed by our own country, and by other countries of the great Christian Federation, nay, that it is expressly established by international law, as the proper mode of determining justice between nations,—while the feats of hardihood by which it is waged, and the triumphs of its fields, are exalted beyond all other labors, whether of learning, industry, or benevolence, as the wellspring of glory. Alas! upon our own heads be the judgment of barbarism which we pronounce upon those who have gone before!
Who has taught you, O man! thus to find glory in an act, performed by a nation, which you condemn as a crime or a barbarism, when committed by an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find this incongruous morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw these partial laws of an impartial God? Man is immortal; but nations are mortal. Man has a higher destiny than nations. Can nations be less amenable to the supreme moral law? Each individual is an atom of the mass. Must not the mass, in its conscience, be like the individuals of which it is composed? Shall the mass, in relation with other masses, do what individuals in relation with each other may not do? As in the physical creation, so in the moral, there is but one rule for the individual and the mass. It was the lofty discovery of Newton, that the simple law which determines the fall of an apple prevails everywhere throughout the universe, reaching from earth to heaven, and controlling the infinite motions of the spheres. So, with equal scope, another simple law, the law of right, which binds the individual, binds also two or three when gathered together, binds conventions and congregations of men, binds villages, towns, and cities, binds states, nations, and races, clasps the whole human family in its embrace, and binds in self-imposed bonds, a just and omnipotent God.
Stripped of all delusive apology and tried by that comprehensive law under which nations are set to the bar like common men, war falls from glory into barbarous guilt, taking its place among bloody transgressions, while its flaming honors are turned into shame. Painful to existing prejudice as this may be, we must learn to abhor it, as we abhor similar transgressions by vulgar offenders. Every word of reprobation which the enlightened conscience now fastens upon the savage combatant in trial by battle, or which it applies to the unhappy being who in murderous duel takes the life of his fellow-man, belongs also to the nation that appeals to war. Amidst the thunders of Sinai God declared, "Thou shalt not kill"; and the voice of these thunders, with this commandment, is prolonged to our own day in the echoes of Christian churches. What mortal shall restrict the application of these words? Who on earth is empowered to vary or abridge the commandments of God? Who shall presume to declare that this injunction was directed, not to nations, but to individuals only; not to many, but to one only; that one man shall not kill but that many may; that one man shall not slay in duel, but that a nation may slay a multitude in the duel of war; that each individual is forbidden to destroy the life of a single human being, but that a nation is not forbidden to cut off by the sword a whole people? We are struck with horror and our hair stands on end, at the report of a single murder; we think of the soul hurried to final account; we hunt the murderer; and Government puts forth its energies to secure his punishment. Viewed in the unclouded light of truth, what is war but organized murder, murder of malice aforethought, in cold blood, under sanction of impious law, through the operation of extensive machinery of crime, with innumerable hands, at incalculable cost of money, by subtle contrivances of cunning and skill, or amidst the fiendish atrocities of the savage, brutal assault. The outrages, which, under most solemn sanction, it permits and invokes for professed purposes of justice, cannot be authorized by any human power; and they must rise in overwhelming judgment, not only against those who wield the weapons of battle, but more still against all who uphold its monstrous arbitrament.
Oh, when shall the St. Louis of the nations arise, and in the spirit of true greatness, proclaim that henceforward forever the great trial by battle shall cease, that war shall be abolished throughout the commonwealth of civilization, that a spectacle so degrading shall never be allowed again to take place, and that it is the duty of nations, involving the highest and wisest policy, to establish love between each other, and, in all respects, at all times, with all persons, whether their own people or the people of other lands, to be governed by the sacred law of right, as between man and man.
FOOTNOTE:
[34] From the "True Grandeur of Nations," delivered in Boston, July 4, 1845.