THE ETHICS OF WAR.-1860. From "Westminster Review." THE HE history of ethics is, we believe, very well understood by the few who have taken pains to study it closely; nor do we suppose that it contains any paradox to such. But, on a superficial view it is highly paradoxical and full of inconsistencies. On the one hand, it appears that the earliest knowledge attained by mankind, is an acquaintance with moral right. The child, or at least the youth, seems to know it so instinctively, as, from the freshness of his sense, to give truer verdicts on many subjects than experienced men. Barbarians, to the astonishment sometimes of our churchmen, manifest that we have very little to teach them of that knowledge of which we may have been too ready to think ourselves the privileged depositaries. On second thoughts, we see not only how it is, but why it is thus; that human society would never be able to coalesce at all, unless moral feeling were universal and instinctive; an almost immediate consequence of which is, the desire of public rule, enforcing justice; and since all the sciences of observation and experience presuppose civilized life, they are naturally posterior to that knowledge which is a previous condition of civil union. Nevertheless one branch of ethics which touches domestic life most closely, and as to which we need in very early youth firm and positive principles, is a marked exception; so that in it we find an avowed and sharp contrast between barbarian and civilized ethics. Of course we refer to the relations of the sexes, and the approval of polygamy and concubinage among barbarians. Scarcely have we explained this to ourselves, when we are mortified to discover that in the midst of Christianity and civilization, no sooner do men throw off reverence for traditional precepts, than an alarming fraction of them gravitates towards an immorality of sentiment on this subject far baser than that of barbarians. When we pass from social to national ethics we find paradoxes still greater. In many ages of the world the very nations who seem most scrupulously virtuous in their internal relations, are judged by their neighbours outside* to be proportionably unjust and violent in their foreign behaviour; and yet seem not to know it, but generally to have a firm belief that they are acting a rightful, reasonable, and necessary part, when their conduct, if it be wrong, is nothing short of murder, robbery, and other high crimes on a great scale. Historians have remarked, that the foreign dependencies of free nations are ruled more oppressively than those of arbitrary monarchs, and that where both possess plantations cultivated by slaves, the slaves of the freer people are treated more rigorously and have less chance of rising out of their degradation. Again and again is the sad fact displayed, that when by means of free and just institutions a nation has become inwardly strong, it rarely shows any desire that its neighbours should share like advantages, but perhaps superciliously alleges that they are not fit for freedom. It is apparently as ready to assail national existence as if it did not know the dearness of nationality; in short, it is hard to say that the wars of free states have been entered into at all more scrupulously and justly than those of despots, or that their successes have been less greedy and less ferocious. These and such like phenomena may not only be explained, but so explained as to blunt the edge of our indignation, though it cannot abate our sorrow. But while such facts as we have named may seem casual or transitory, a deeper and more permanent paradox remains, that, according to the current morality of Christendom, two nations may be engaged in deadly struggle and neither be in the wrong. While inflicting mutual miseries, of which the deaths and wounds in battle are but a small fraction, both sides may be virtuous and feel reciprocal esteem, so that by a few strokes of the pen passing between two ambitious and narrow-hearted men, the armies which yesterday put forth all the appliances of force and craft and science for mutual destruction, to-day embrace as friends, and honour the hostility which has distressed them. This paradox also, no doubt, can be explained, but to explain it falls short of satisfying the judgment. To say * The Athenian ambassadors in Thucydides (v. 105) say straight out to the Melian Senate: "Among themselves, and in regard to their native institutions, the Lacedæmonians for the most part behave very virtuously; but towards all others they, most signally of all men whom we know, account what is pleasant honourable, and what is convenient just." Within twenty years all Greece confessed the truth of this harsh statement. that in a war both sides are right, is to overthrow the only moral theory on which, as far as we know, war has ever been defended, viz., by comparing it to necessary self-defence against a ruffian, or to police procedure against a criminal, which is justified in civil life. This theory essentially supposes that one side is guilty or unjust. To treat combatants on both sides as morally on a par, and both justified by the law of "discipline;" not only entirely overthrows this analogy, but admits the atrocious moral heresy that the organic centre of a State called "the Government," can, at its own pleasure and its own sole responsibility, liberate its citizens from human duties towards the citizens of other States. As in certain religions, or religious orders, it is supposed that the high priest or grand master may claim and receive absolute obedience, concentrating in himself all the moral responsibility, so that the votaries are conscientiously bound to obey whatever deed of ferocity he may enjoin, and are acquitted of blame by the fact of his command; such, according to the appearance of things, and (it would seem) according to the creed -f Christendom, is the relation of every dutiful subject towards nis "Government." Two armies meet for mutual slaughter. Neither of the two asks, or may ask, the justice of the quarrel, the rightfulness of the end sought, or of the means used. Their respective "Governments" take the responsibility of this; and though of the two it will be admitted that one or other may be in the wrong, yet the soldiers on both sides are held to be acquitted; and that, even if they happen to believe their Government to be perpetrating high-handed crime. In such a state of public facts, and such a theory or no-theory to justify them, no one can wonder at the rise and progress of an opinion that "war is essentially an immoral state." This opinion exists in minds wholly opposed, and with results wholly opposite : the one class condemning war in toto for its immorality, the other always justifying it in detail on the ground of "necessity," yet pleading its essential immorality to defend every procedure in it which is most unscrupulous but happens just then to be convenient. To the former class of course the Quakers belong. Once perhaps scarcely any but actual members of the Quaker body went all lengths in the absolute condemnation of war; but now many who are not Quakers may be heard to use language similar or identical: and we think the grounds of this opinion have somewhat shifted since first the Quakers adopted and systematised it. Originally it may have been suggested by a severe literalism in the interpretation of a single Scripture text; but the Quakers have shown in a thousand ways that whenever they seize a broad principle, they can overleap special texts as decisively as the boldest and freest of Christians. In fact, so strongly marked has been their unflinching devotedness to broad and even extreme principles, that in the few cases where they may seem to press a text slavishly, one may rather believe that the letter to which they appeal is their servant and tool, than that it is their master. Nor is it by quoting "Resist not evil," that they make converts to their peculiar view of war, but by displaying the want of moral basis to justify the horrors in which wars abound. Indeed, to the policeman no Quaker has any real opposition. If they do not cry aloud their approval of his proceedings, one still cannot doubt that they approve in their hearts: and whenever an attempt is made to argue with them, they deny the fact, that war is an operation of international police, inasmuch as there is no court, no magistrate, no public trial, no verdict; nor is there any ostensible and intelligible mark by which bystanders can learn which is the culprit and which is the officer. The total mass of those who are called the "peace party" in England is not great; but unhappily, while they are not numerically strong enough so to enforce preventive justice that war may be avoidable, they are morally powerful to divert nearly all the zeal and energy which might else effect very sensible improvements in martial law and in the forms of declaring war, and make hasty and unjust war much more difficult. Looking simply to what is, and not to what we wish to be, it seems inevitable to concede to the Quaker that war is not a process of police. Nations are mutually in the condition of a community in which there is no magistrate, but every man wears arms and revenges his own wrongs at his own instinct, if he is strong enough; or if he is not, then associates some coadjutor to waylay and punish the offender. Then naturally the little and the weak are prudentially just, but the strong and swaggering can afford to use more latitude; since it suffices for them to be only not so unscrupulous as to bring about a coalition that will overpower them. All must entitle such a state of things anarchy; the essence of which is that force is used for private ends, without the intervention of those forms which experience and reason dictate as most efficacious for maintaining public law. If society could be transported back to anarchical times, or rather, if we ourselves could be transported to the backwoods of America or the inmost wilds of Australia, where from the extreme thinness of population judicial institutions were as yet utterly inefficacious-terrible as would be the calamity to our sentiment, we could not embrace the Quaker doctrine of going unarmed. To display a peaceable, or we might call it a sheepish deportment, in the presence of wolves, would stimulate wolfish appetite and exasperate unscrupulous ferocity, with evils immensely worse than those which result from sturdy and perpetual hostilities. Equally, or indeed much more, do we maintain that for a rich, industrious nation like England, to proclaim that she does not fight however cruelly attacked, would involve to herself and to the morality of the world mischiefs a hundredfold worse than those of our stubbornest wars. Our readers therefore must not suppose that we are espousing the Quaker side in its essential points; but unless the thoughtful part of the nation probes this question to the bottom, conceding to the Quaker and to the peace party all that is true in their view, unscrupulous men of the extreme opposite class have the game in their own hands; and the nation drifting without moral guidance, learning nothing from past calamities, must expect, like all other great empires which have done the same, to fall at last into irreparable disaster. Precisely because we stand on an eminence, we encounter immensely more risk than those who have no heterogeneous and distant dependencies. Hitherto the ministers of religion, equally with the literary men and the poets, have virtually blown the flames of war by teaching, directly or indirectly, that it is the duty of "subjects" to fight in any or every cause which their "Governments may prescribe. Although, until a great revolution of mind has taken place, neither Church nor State can organize international rule in place of anarchy, this is only a stronger reason why those who alone can promote a revolution of mind should beware of misdirecting their moral influence. Let us for a moment consider what the doctrine War, as it exists, is at its best comparable to a just process of "Lynch Law," or to the just resistance of a felonious attack; and at its worst to the ferocious struggle of two savages, alike regardless of justice and of formal legality. Imagine that in a state of anarchy the heads of two families have fallen into feud; and that each commands his younger kinsfolk to aid him, and to kill as many as they are able of the other family. It is probable that they would zealously obey; nor could we severely blame them; but might merely remark, that these poor ignorant means. |