Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 | Page 2

of
killing, while the combatants only think, and will only think, of the
nobleness of dying. To the peace advocates the soldier is always a man
going to slaughter his neighbors; to his countrymen he is a man going
to lose his life for their sake--that is, to perform the loftiest act of
devotion of which a human being is capable. It is not wonderful, then,
that the usual effect of appeals for peace made by neutrals is to produce
mingled exasperation and amusement among the belligerents. To the
great majority of Europeans our civil war was a shocking spectacle, and
the persistence of the North in carrying it on a sad proof of ferocity and
lust of dominion. To the great majority of those engaged in carrying it
on the struggle was a holy one, in which it was a blessing to perish.
Probably nothing ever fell more cruelly on human ears than the taunts
and execrations which American wives and mothers heard from the
other side of the ocean, heaped on the husbands and sons whom they
had sent to the battle-field, never thinking at all of their slaying, but
thinking solely of their being slain; and very glad indeed that, if death
had to come, it should come in such a cause. If we go either to France
or Germany to-day, we shall find a precisely similar state of feeling. If
the accounts we hear be true--and we know of no reason to doubt
them--there is no more question in the German and French mind that
French and German soldiers are doing their highest duty in fighting,
than there was in the most patriotic Northern or Southern home during
our war; and we may guess, therefore, how a German or French mother,
the light of whose life had gone out at Gravelotte or Orleans, and who
hugs her sorrow as a great gift of God, would receive an address from
New York on the general wickedness and folly of her sacrifice.
The fact is--and it is one of the most suggestive facts we know of--that
the very growth of the public conscience has helped to make peace
somewhat more difficult, war vastly more terrible. When war was the

game of kings and soldiers, the nations went into it in a half-hearted
way, and sincerely loathed it; now that war is literally an outburst of
popular feeling, the friend of peace finds most of his logic powerless.
There is little use in reasoning with a man who is ready to die on the
folly or wickedness of dying. When a nation has worked itself up to the
point of believing that there are objects within its reach for which life
were well surrendered, it has reached a region in which the wise saws
and modern instances of the philosopher or lawyer cannot touch it, and
in which pictures of the misery of war only help to make the martyr's
crown seem more glorious.
Therefore, we doubt whether the work of peace is well done by those
who, amidst the heat and fury of actual hostilities, dwell upon the folly
and cruelty of them, and appeal to the combatants to stop fighting, on
the ground that fighting involves suffering and loss of life, and the
destruction of property. The principal effect of this on "the average
man" has been to produce the impression that the friends of peace are
ninnies, and to make him smile over the earnestness with which
everybody looks on his own wars as holy and inevitable, and his
neighbors' wars as unnecessary and wicked. Any practical movement to
put an end to war must begin far away from the battle-field and its
horrors. It must take up and deal with the various influences, social and
political, which create and perpetuate the state of mind which makes
people ready to fight. Preaching up peace and preaching down war
generally are very like general homilies in praise of virtue and
denunciation of vice. Everybody agrees with them, but nobody is ever
ready to admit their applicability to his particular case. War is, in our
time, essentially the people's work. Its guilt is theirs, as its losses and
sufferings are theirs. All attempts to saddle emperors, kings, and nobles
with the responsibility of it may as well be given up from this time
forward.
Now, what are the agencies which operate in producing the frame of
mind which makes people ready to go to war on small provocation? It
is at these the friends of peace must strike, in time of peace, and not
after the cannon has begun to roar and the country has gone mad with
patriotism and rage. They are, first of all, the preaching in the press and
elsewhere of the false and pernicious doctrine