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Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. II.




I myself certainly agree with this last class; but upon this arises a
delusion, which I shall have some trouble in making the reader
understand: and of this I am confident-that a majority, perhaps, in
every given amount of readers, will share in the delusion; will part
from me in the persuasion that the error I attempt to expose is no
error at all, but that it is myself who am in the wrong. The delusion
which I challenge as such, respects the very meaning and value of a
sacrifice made to Christianity. What is it? what do we properly mean,
by a concession or a sacrifice made to a spiritual power, such as
Christianity? If a king and his people, impressed by the unchristian
character of war, were to say, in some solemn act--'We, the parties
undersigned, for the reasons stated in the body of this document,
proclaim to all nations, that from and after Midsummer eve of the year
1850, this being the eve of St. John the Baptist, (who was the herald
of Christ,) we will no more prosecute any interest of ours, unless the
one sole interest of national defence, by means of war,--and this
sacrifice we make as a concession and act of homage to Christianity,--
would _that_ vow, I ask, sincerely offered, and steadily observed,
really be a sacrifice made to Christianity? Not at all. A sacrifice,
that was truly such, to a spiritual religion, must be a sacrifice not
verbally (though sincerely) dedicating itself to the religion, but a
sacrifice wrought and accomplished by that religion, through and by its
own spirit. Midsummer eve of 1850 could clearly make no spiritual
change in the king or his people--such they would be on the morning
after St. John's day, as on the morning before it--_i. e._, filled
with all elements (though possibly undeveloped) of strife, feud,
pernicious ambition,

The delusion, therefore, which I charge upon this religious class of
war denouncers is, that whilst they see and recognize this infinite
imperfection of any influence which Christianity yet exercises upon the
world, they nevertheless rely upon that acknowledged shadow for the
accomplishment of what would, in such circumstances, be a real miracle;
they rely upon that shadow, as truly and entirely as if it were already
that substance which, in a vast revolution of ages, it will finally
become. And they rely upon this mockery in _two_ senses; first,
for the _endurance_ of the frail human resolution that would thaw
in an hour before a great outrage, or provocation suited to the nobler
infirmities of man. Secondly, which is the point I mainly aim at,
assuming, for a moment, that the resolution _could_ endure,
amongst all mankind, we are all equally convinced, that an evil so vast
is not likely to be checked or controlled, except by some very
extraordinary power. Well, where _is_ it? Show me that power. I
know of none but Christianity. _There_, undoubtedly, is hope. But,
in order that the hope may become rational, the power must become
practical. And practical it is not in the extent required, until this
Christianity, from being dimly appreciated by a section [Footnote
_What_ section, if you please? I, for my part, do not agree with
those that geographically degrade Christianity as occupying but a
trifle on the area of our earth. Mark this; all Eastern populations
have dwindled upon better acquaintance. Persia that _ought_ to
have, at least, two hundred and fifty millions of people, and
_would_ have them under English government, and once was supposed
to have at least one hundred millions, how many millions has she?
_Eight!_ This was ascertained by Napoleon's emissary in 1808,
General Gardanne. Afghanistan has very little more, though some falsely
count fourteen millions. There go two vast chambers of Mahometanism;
not twenty millions between them. Hindostan may _really_ have one
hundred and twenty millions claimed for her. As to the Burman Empire,
I, nor anybody else knows the truth. But, as to China, I have never for
a moment been moved by those ridiculous estimates of the flowery
people, which our simple countrymen copy. Instead of three hundred and
fifty millions, a third of the human race upon the most exaggerated
estimate, read eighty or one hundred millions at most. Africa, as it
regards religion, counts for a cipher. Europe, America, and the half of
Asia, as to space, are Christian. Consequently, the total _facit_,
as regards Christianity, is not what many amiable infidels make it to
be. My dears, your wish was father to that thought.] of this world,
shall have been the law that overrides the whole. That consummation is
not immeasurably distant. Even now, from considerations connected with
China, with New Zealand, Borneo, Australia, we may say, that already
the fields are white for harvest. But alas! the interval is brief
between Christianity small, and Christianity great, as regards space or
terraqueous importance, compared with that interval which separates
Christianity formally professed, from Christianity thankfully
acknowledged by universal man in beauty and power.

Here, therefore, is one spoke in the wheel for so vast a change as war
dethroned, viz., that you see no cause, though you should travel round
the whole horizon, adequate to so prodigious an effect. What could do
it? Why, Christianity could do it. Aye, true; but man disarms
Christianity. And no mock Christianity, no lip homage to Christianity,
will answer.

But is war, then, to go on for ever? Are we never to improve? Are
nations to conduct their intercourse eternally under the secret
understanding that an unchristian solution of all irreconcileable feuds
stands in the rear as the ultimate appeal? I answer that war, going on
even for ever, may still be for ever amending its modes and its results
upon human happiness; secondly, that we not only are under no fatal
arrest in our process of improvement, but that, as regards war, history
shows how steadily we _have_ been improving; and, thirdly, that
although war may be irreversible as the last resource, this last
resource may constantly be retiring further into the rear. Let us speak
to this last point. War is the last resource only, because other and
more intellectual resources for solving disputes are not available. And
_why_ are they not? Simply, because the knowledge, and the logic,
which ultimately will govern the case, and the very circumstances of
the case itself in its details, as the basis on which this knowledge
and logic are to operate, happen not to have been sufficiently
developed. A code of law is not a spasmodic effort of gigantic talent
in any one man or any one generation; it is a slow growth of accidents
and occasions expanding with civilization; dependent upon time as a
multiform element in its development; and presupposing often a
concurrent growth of _analogous_ cases towards the completion of
its system. For instance, the law which regulates the rights of
shipping, seafaring men, and maritime commerce--how slow was its
development! Before such works as the _Consolato del Mare_ had
been matured, how wide must have been the experience, and how slow its
accumulation! During that long period of infancy for law, how many must
have been the openings for ignorant and unintentional injustice! How
differently, again, will the several parties to any transaction
construe the rights of the case! Discussion, without rules for guiding
it, will but embitter the dispute. And in the absence of all guidance
from the intellect, gradually weaving a _common_ standard of
international appeal, it is clear that nations _must_ fight, and
_ought_ to fight. Not being convinced, it is base to pretend that
you _are_ convinced; and failing to be convinced by your neighbor's
arguments, you confess yourself a poltroon (and moreover you
_invite_ injuries from every neighbor) if you pocket your wrongs.
The only course in such a case is to thump your neighbor, and to thump
him soundly for the present. This treatment is very serviceable to your
neighbor's optics; he sees things in a new light after a sufficient
course of so distressing a regimen. But mark, even in this case, war
has no tendency to propagate war, but tends to the very opposite
result. To thump is as costly, and in other ways as painful, as to
_be_ thumped. The evil to both sides arises in an undeveloped
state of law. If rights were defined by a well considered code growing
out of long experience, each party sees that this scourge of war would
continually tend to limit itself. Consequently the very necessity of
war becomes the strongest invitation to that system of judicial logic
which forms its sole limitation. But all war whatsoever stands in these
circumstances. It follows that all war whatever, unless on the brutal
principle of a Spartan warfare, that made war its own sufficient object
and self-justification, operates as a perpetual bounty offered to men
upon the investigation and final adjudication of those disputed cases
through which war prospers. Hence it is, viz., because the true
boundaries of reciprocal rights are for ever ascertaining themselves
more clearly, that war is growing less frequent. The fields open to
injustice (which originally from pure ignorance are so vast)
continually (through deeper and more expansive surveys by man's
intellect--searching--reflecting--comparing) are narrowing themselves;
narrowing themselves in this sense, that all nations under a common
centre of religious civilization, as Christendom suppose, or Islamism,
would not fight--no, and would not (by the national sense of wrong and
right) be permitted to fight--in a cause _confessedly_ condemned
by equity as now developed. The causes of war that still remain, are
causes on which international law is silent--that large arrear of cases
as yet unsettled; or else they are cases in which though law speaks
with an authentic voice, it speaks in vain, because the circumstances
are doubtful; so that, if the law is fixed as a lamp nailed to a wall,
yet the _incidence_ of the law on the particular circumstances,
becomes as doubtful as the light of the lamp upon objects that are
capriciously moving. We see all this illustrated in a class of cases
that powerfully illustrate the good and the bad in war, the why and the
wherefore, as likewise the why _not_, and therefore I presume the
wherefore _not_; and this class of cases belongs to the _lex
vicinitatis_. In the Roman law this section makes a great figure.
And speaking accurately, it makes a greater in our own. But the reason
why this _law of neighborhood_ seems to fill so much smaller a
section in ours, is because in English law, being _positively_ a
longer section, _negatively_ to the whole compass of our law, it
is less. The Roman law would have paved a road to the moon. And what is
_that_ expressed in time? Let us see: a railway train, worked at
the speed of the Great Western Express, accomplishes easily a thousand
miles in twenty-four hours; consequently in two hundred and forty days
or eight months it would run into the moon with its buffers, and break
up the quarters of that Robinson Crusoe who (and without any Friday) is
the only policeman that parades that little pensive appendage or tender
to our fuming engine of an earth. But the English law--oh frightful
reader, don't even think of such a question as its relation in space
and time to the Roman law. That it would stretch to the fixed stars is
plain, but to which of them,--don't now, dear persecuting reader,
unsettle our brains by asking. Enough it is that both in Roman and
English law the rights of neighborhood are past measuring. Has a man a
right to play the German flute, where the partitions are slender, all
day long in the house adjoining to yours? Or, supposing a beneficent
jury (beneficent to _him_) finds this to be no legal nuisance, has
he a right to play it ill? Or, because juries, when tipsy, will wink at
anything, does the privilege extend to the jew's-harp? to the poker and
tongs? to the marrowbones and cleavers? Or, without ranging through the
whole of the _Spectator's_ culinary music, will the bagpipes be
found within benefit of jury law? _War to the knife_ I say, before
we'll submit to _that_. And if the law won't protect us against
it, then we'll turn rebels.

Now this law of neighborhood, this _lex vicinitatis_, amongst the
Romans, righted itself and settled itself, as amongst ourselves it
continues to do, by means of actions or legal suits. If a man poisons
us with smoke, we compel him by an action to eat his own smoke, or (if
he chooses) to make his chimneys eat it. Here you see is a transmuted
war; in a barbarous state, fire and sword would have avenged this
invasion of smoke; but amongst civilized men, paper bullets in the form
of _Qui tam_ and _Scire facias_, beat off the enemy. And on the same
principle, exactly as the law of international rights clears up its
dark places, war gradually narrows its grounds, and the _jus gentium_
defines itself through national attorneys, _i. e._, diplomatists.

For instance, now I have myself seen a case where a man cultivating a
flower-garden, and distressed for some deliverance from his rubbish of
dead leaves, litter, straw, stones, took the desperate resolution of
projecting the whole upon his neighbor's flower-garden. I, a chance
spectator of the outrage, knew too much of this world to lodge any
protest against it, on the principle of mere abstract justice; so it
would have passed unnoticed, but for the accident that his injured
neighbor unexpectedly raised up his head above the dividing wall, and
reproached the aggressor with his unprincipled conduct. This aggressor,
adding evil to evil, suggested as the natural remedy for his own wrong,
that the sufferer should pass the nuisance onwards to the garden next
beyond him; from which it might be posted forward on the same
principle. The aggrieved man, however, preferred passing it back,
without any discount to the original proprietor. Here now, is a ripe
case, a _causa teterrima_, for war between the parties, and for a
national war had the parties been nations. In fact, the very same
injury, in a more aggravated shape, is perpetrated from time to time by
Jersey upon ourselves, and would, upon a larger scale, right itself by
war. Convicts are costly to maintain; and Jersey, whose national
revenue is limited, being too well aware of this, does us the favor to
land upon the coasts of Hampshire, Dorset, &c., all the criminals whom
she cannot summarily send back to self-support, at each jail-delivery.
'What are we to do in England?' is the natural question propounded by
the injured scoundrels, when taking leave of their Jersey escort.
'Anything you please,' is the answer: 'rise if you can, to be dukes:
only never come back hither; since, dukes or _no_ dukes, to the
rest of Christendom, to _us_ of the Channel Islands you will
always be transported felons.' There is therefore a good right of
action, _i.e._, a good ground of war, against Jersey, on the part
of Great Britain, since, besides the atrocious injury inflicted, this
unprincipled little island has the audacity to regard our England, (all
Europe looking on,) as existing only for the purposes of a sewer or
cess-pool to receive _her_ impurities. Some time back I remember a
Scottish newspaper holding up the case as a newly discovered horror in
the social system. But, in a quiet way Jersey has always been engaged
in this branch of exportation, and rarely fails to 'run' a cargo of
rogues upon our shore, once or so in the season. What amuses one
besides, in this Scottish denunciation of the villany, is, that
Scotland [Footnote: To banish them 'forth of the kingdom,' was the
_euphuismus_; but the reality understood was--to carry the knaves,
like foxes in a bag, to the English soil, and there unbag them for
English use.] of old, pursued the very same mode of jail-delivery as to
knaves that were not thought ripe enough for hanging: she carted them
to the English border, unchained them, and hurried them adrift into the
wilderness, saying--Now, boys, shift for yourselves, and henceforth
plunder none but Englishmen.

What I deduce from all this is, that as the feuds arising between
individuals under the relation of neighbors, are so far from tending to
a hostile result, that, on the contrary, as coming under a rule of law
already ascertained, or furnishing the basis for a new rule, they
gradually tighten the cords which exclude all opening for quarrel; not
otherwise is the result, and therefore the usefulness, of war amongst
nations. All the causes of war, the occasions upon which it is likely
to arise, the true and the ostensible motives, are gradually evolved,
are examined, searched, valued, by publicists; and by such means, in
the further progress of men, a comprehensive law of nations will
finally be accumulated, not such as now passes for international law,
(a worthless code that _has_ no weight in the practice of nations,
nor deserves any,) but one which will exhaust the great body of cases
under which wars have arisen under the Christian era, and gradually
collect a public opinion of Christendom upon the nature of each
particular case. The causes that _have_ existed for war are the
causes that _will_ exist; or, at least, they are the same under
modifications that will simply vary the rule, as our law cases in the
courts are every day circumstantiating the particular statute
concerned. At this stage of advance, and when a true European opinion
has been created, a '_sensus communis_,' or community of feeling
on the main classifications of wars, it will become possible to erect a
real Areopagus, or central congress for all Christendom, not with any
commission to suppress wars,--a policy which would neutralize itself by
reacting as a fresh cause of war, since high-spirited nations would arm
for the purpose of resisting such decrees; but with the purpose and the
effect of oftentimes healing local or momentary animosities, and also
by publishing the opinion of Europe, assembled in council, with the
effect of taking away the shadow of dishonor from the act of retiring
from war. Not to mention that the mere delay, involved in the waiting
for the solemn opinion of congress, would always be friendly to pacific
councils. But _would_ the belligerents wait? That concession might
be secured by general exchange of treaties, in the same way that the
cooperation of so many nations has been secured to the suppression of
the trade in slaves. And one thing is clear, that when all the causes
of war, involving _manifest_ injustice, are banished by the force
of European opinion, focally converged upon the subject, the range of
war will be prodigiously circumscribed. The costliness of war, which,
for various reasons has been continually increasing since the feudal
period, will operate as another limitation upon its field, concurring
powerfully with the public declaration from a council of collective
Christendom.

There is, besides, a distinct and separate cause of war, more fatal to
the possibilities of peace in Europe than open injustice; and this
cause being certainly in the hands of nations to deal with as they
please, there is a tolerable certainty that a congress _sincerely_
pacific would cut it up by the roots. It is a cause noticed by Kant in
his Essay on Perpetual Peace, and with great sagacity, though otherwise
that little work is not free from visionary self-delusions: and this
cause lies in the diplomacy of Europe. Treaties of peace are so
constructed, as almost always to sow the seeds of future wars. This
seems to the inexperienced reader a matter of carelessness or laxity in
the choice of expression; and sometimes it may have been so; but more
often it has been done under the secret dictation of powerful courts--
making peaces only as truces, anxious only for time to nurse their
energies, and to keep open some plausible call for war. This is not
only amongst the most extensive causes of war, but the very worst:
because it gives a colorable air of justice, and almost of necessity to
a war, which is, in fact, the most outrageously unjust, as being
derived from a pretext silently prepared in former years, with mere
subtlety of malice: it is a war growing out of occasions, forged
beforehand, lest no occasions should spontaneously arise. Now, this
cause of war could and would be healed by a congress, and through an
easy reform in European diplomacy.[Footnote: One great _nidus_ of
this insidious preparation for war under the very masque of peace,
which Kant, from brevity, has failed to particularize, lies in the
neglecting to make any provision for cases that are likely enough to
arise. A, B, C, D, are all equally possible, but the treaty provides a
specific course of action only for A, suppose. Then upon B or C
arising, the high contracting parties, though desperately and equally
pacific, find themselves committed to war actually by a treaty of
lasting peace. Their pacific majesties sigh, and say--Alas! that it
should be so, but really fight we must, for what says the treaty?]

It is the strongest confirmation of the power inherent in growing
civilization, to amend war, and to narrow the field of war, if we look
back for the records of the changes in this direction which have
already arisen in generations before our own.

The most careless reviewer of history can hardly fail to read a rude
outline of progress made by men in the rights, and consequently in the
duties of war through the last twenty-five centuries. It is a happy
circumstance for man--that oftentimes he is led by pure selfishness
into reforms, the very same as high principle would have prompted; and
in the next stage of his advance, when once habituated to an improved
code of usages, he begins to find a gratification to his sensibilities,
(partly luxurious sensibilities, but partly moral,) in what originally
had been a mere movement of self-interest. Then comes a third stage, in
which having thoroughly reconciled himself to a better order of things,
and made it even necessary to his own comfort, at length he begins in
his reflecting moments to perceive a moral beauty and a fitness in
arrangements that had emanated from accidents of convenience, so that
finally he generates a sublime pleasure of conscientiousness out of
that which originally commenced in the meanest forms of mercenary
convenience. A Roman lady of rank, out of mere voluptuous regard to her
own comfort, revolted from the harsh clamors of eternal chastisements
inflicted on her numerous slaves; she forbade them; the grateful slaves
showed their love for her; gradually and unintentionally she trained
her feelings, when thus liberated from a continual temptation to the
sympathies with cruelty, into a demand for gentler and purer
excitement. Her purpose had been one of luxury; but, by the benignity
of nature still watching for ennobling opportunities, the actual result
was a development given to the higher capacities of her heart. In the
same way, when the brutal right (and in many circumstances the brutal
duty) of inflicting death upon prisoners taken in battle, had exchanged
itself for the profits of ransom or slavery, this relaxation of
ferocity (though commencing in selfishness) gradually exalted itself
into a habit of mildness, and some dim perception of a sanctity in
human life. The very vice of avarice ministered to the purification of
barbarism; and the very evil of slavery in its earliest form was
applied to the mitigation of another evil--war conducted in the spirit
of piratical outrage. The commercial instincts of men having worked one
set of changes in war, a second set of changes was prompted by
instincts derived from the arts of ornament and pomp. Splendor of arms,
of banners, of equipages, of ceremonies, and the elaborate forms of
intercourse with enemies through conferences, armistices, treaties of
peace, &c., having tamed the savagery of war into connection with modes
of intellectual grandeur, and with the endless restraints of
superstition or scrupulous religion,--a permanent light of civilization
began to steal over the bloody shambles of buccaneering warfare. Other
modes of harmonizing influences arose more directly from the bosom of
war itself. Gradually the mere practice of war, and the culture of war
though merely viewed as a rude trade of bloodshed, ripened into an
intellectual art. Were it merely with a view to more effectual carnage,
this art (however simple and gross at first) opened at length into wide
scientific arts, into strategies, into tactics, into castrametation,
into poliorcetics, and all the processes through which the first rude
efforts of martial cunning finally connect themselves with the
exquisite resources of science. War, being a game in which each side
forces the other into the instant adoption of all improvements through
the mere necessities of self-preservation, became continually more
intellectual.

It is interesting to observe the steps by which, were it only through
impulses of self-conservation, and when searching with a view to more
effectual destructiveness, war did and must refine itself from a horrid
trade of butchery into a magnificent and enlightened science. Starting
from no higher impulse or question than how to cut throats most
rapidly, most safely, and on the largest scale, it has issued even at
our own stage of advance into a science, magnificent, oftentimes
ennobling, and cleansed from all horrors except those which (not being
within man's power utterly to divorce from it) no longer stand out as
reproaches to his humanity.

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