It is not that human
beings can live without occasional wars, but they may live with fewer wars,
and take more just views of the evils which war inflicts upon mankind. If
three men were to have their legs and arms broken, and were to remain all
night exposed to the inclemency of weather, the whole country would be in a
state of the most dreadful agitation. Look at the wholesale death of a
field of battle, ten acres covered with dead, and half dead, and dying; and
the shrieks and agonies of many thousand human beings. There is more of
misery inflicted upon mankind by one year of war, than by all the civil
peculations and oppressions of a century. Yet it is a state into which the
mass of mankind rush with the greatest avidity, hailing official murderers,
in scarlet, gold, and cocks' feathers, as the greatest and most glorious of
human creatures. It is the business of every wise and good man to set
himself against this passion for military glory, which really seems to be
the most fruitful source of human misery.
"What would be said of a party of gentlemen who were to sit very peaceably
conversing for half an hour, and then were to fight for another half hour,
then shake hands, and at the expiration of thirty minutes fight again? Yet
such has been the state of the world between 1714 and 1815, a period in
which there was in England as many years of war as peace.
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