The House of Commons. What do our Repre vate, your national and therefore your individual life. The members of it may have temptations to which we are not exposed. If we are loyal to our common country we may find that what unites patrician and plebeian is stronger than that which separates them. If we have any I am not likely, as a plebeian, to forget that part of our Government which stands in closest connexion with ourselves. Of course I desire that it should be what it professes to be, that it should faithfully represent the sentatives mind of the English people. But that it may do this, represent? there must be a mind to represent. Every one of us may be helping to form that mind. function here, that is our function. not to set England above other countries; to foster any national conceit. We are not to maintain that nations are only good and true when they have a Sovereign and a House of Peers and a House of Commons. But since this is the form of Government under which we have been nurtured, which has moulded the thoughts of us and our fathers, our loyalty to it will be the best security that we honour the institutions and desire the growth of every other Nation. Our judgments are apt to be arrogant, because we see but a little way. The hills that surround us and protect us may shut out the prospects beyond them. But when we reflect how much those hills are above us, how many generations have dwelt under the shadow of them, and have welcomed the sun as it rose behind them, humbler thoughts will take possession of us. We shall begin to understand that there may be other regions which lie under the shadow of their own hills, which are enlightened by the same sun. 2144 LECTURE XI. WAR. LAW, Language, Government; all these it will be admitted have a certain worth. No one will say that a Nation can exist without them. Few will say that they are not precious to the Individual. But Wardare I speak of that as good either for the Nation or the Individual? We do speak of it as good for both. The history Conflict of feelings of a Nation is often said to be in a great measure the respecting history of its wars. Some of the most conspicuous war. individuals of every Nation have been its warriors. Artists and Poets choose them for their subjects. If we attribute that preference to a Pagan instinct, we are reminded that the books of Moses speak of war as well as the books of Homer; that Joshua and David fought as well as Miltiades and Alexander. If war is said to be the relic of an uncivilised age, we ask ourselves why it has called forth most enthusiasm amongst the people of Europe, which boasts to be most civilised, most to have outgrown old superstitions? If it is pronounced irreligious, the question suggests itself why religion has produced so many wars? If it is said to be the produce of an Aristocratical rule, we Peace has its own brutality and its own curse. Danger of denounc ing War vaguely and rheto rically. can point to a number of instances in which Trade has been the great motive of it. If, as some of us were taught in the Evenings at Home, War is mischievous because it is costly as well as cruel, the children who learnt that lesson, the mothers who taught it, have discovered that speculations may be as costly as battles, that cruelties may be perpetrated by the ledger as well as the sword. If there have been in our day righteous and burning denunciations of the crimes of the Camp, there have been protests as righteous and as burning against the crimes which are engendered by a long peace. It behoves us therefore to approach this subject thoughtfully. I might earn a cheap reputation for morality by speaking to you of war as essentially and inevitably immoral, by affirming that it never had any good work to do in the world, or that it never can have any to do in the times to come. I believe that if I did so I should tempt you to great insincerity; I should lead you to think an admiration wrong in principle which you nevertheless cherish, and feel that you cannot help cherishing. I should teach you to think that the profession of a Soldier could not be a right and honest one; so if you engage in it, or if your friends engage in it, you will assist in making it for yourselves and them what you account it to be. The confusion and mischief of that notion I hold to be incalculable. I mean therefore to shew you what I deem to be the morality of War, what its immorality. I must begin by repudiating certain apologies that are often made for it. The first is this. 'Well, all 'you say against war as unchristian, or impolitic, may 'be true. But it is a necessary evil.' Were I to use Necessary evils; an this language I should tell you at once that a chair immoral of Moral Philosophy is an absurdity and a delusion. phrase. Robbery, Murder, Adultery, are facts as much as War is a fact. If the fact that there have been wars makes them necessary, Robbery, Murder, and Adultery are also necessary. Calling them so-if by necessary I mean that I am not to labour that they should be punished as transgressions-I affirm that there is no order in the world, I canonise disorder. stinct of Self-Pre An allowstinct can never able in Again, it is often said, "There is a natural instinct The in' of Self-Preservation in us all. I cannot let myself be 'killed or plundered; I must take the life of the man servation. 'who threatens to kill or plunder me if I can. Why is 'it different with a number of men who form what is 'called a nation? Why may they not obey the same 'instinct? Why may they not ward off blows, even if 'the lives of those who strike the blows are exacted as 'the payment for them?' There is a sophistry in this plea which ought to be laid bare, since it touches the first principles of social life. No doubt there is an instinct in me which leads me to slay a highwayman. It is an instinct which an organised State is bound to tolerate. The verdict of justifiable homicide is one deliberate which is always accepted as reasonable. But that purpose, phrase implies that the act is only tolerated. Clear military evidence must be produced that the life of a citizen organisahad not been wantonly trifled with even under the greatest provocation. Suppose the injured man had chosen to suffer the wrong-even to be killed himself rather than to take the vengeance into his own hands— we might be sorry that a criminal had been let loose, that a just man had been his victim; but we could not justify a far less a tion. War say that the law had not been honoured-superstitiously honoured it may be, but still honoured-by the refusal to anticipate its decrees. How is it possible to assume such a ground for the deliberate act of an organic nation? How can it treat submission to a brute instinct as a justification for the calling together of an armed force expressly to fulfil the purposes of a Society grounded upon Law; to defend its existence? No natural instinct, nothing less than a moral obligation, can be an excuse for risking the lives of our own citizens, for threatening the lives of other men. Our admiration for soldiers, private men or leaders, means that we suppose them to have done a duty; our belief that any war is worthy of our sympathy means, that we suppose at least one of the nations which entered into it to have done its duty. It is most important for the clearness of our own minds, as important for the wellbeing of our nation, that we should carry this conviction always with us and be ready to apply it in all cases. Let us try to consider it in reference to the different kinds of wars which we read of. I. We cannot forget that every nation now existchanged ing in Europe became a nation through war. Britain from a province to a Nation. Britain was a part of the Roman Empire; a civilised province of that Empire; growing in luxuries. It was christianised when the rest of the Empire was christianised; it had its bishops as well as its prefects. It rebelled frequently against its masters; it was fertile, the saying is, in tyrants. It was not free therefore from petty wars by sea or land. But it was no nation. By battles-to what degree exterminating or subversive of the previous civilisation historians may dispute, but certainly by battles severe and bloody-the Saxons. |