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The Christian Examiner.

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ART. I.THE RELATION OF WAR TO HUMAN NATURE.

La Guerre et la Paix: Recherches sur le Principe et la Constitution du Droit des Gens. Par P. J. PROUDHON. 3° édition. Paris. 1861. 2 vols. 12mo.

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In these trenchant and powerful books, his latest publication, M. Proudhon - a man famous for the probing radicalism of his principles, and for the remorseless sincerity with which he ultimates all the implications of his premises - presents a vigorous and brilliant plea for the social necessity, the divine rightfulness, the varied and copious beneficence of war. The work is done with lucid method, by a master of the material. It is valuable, both for fact and for thought. There is a great deal of wisdom and sound argument in it, still more of dashing emotion and vehement eloquence. But it is vitiated by the dominant presence of French "glory," with its theatric illusions. The setting of its truths in forced perspectives gives them a false moral effect. The discolorations of the rash personality of the author affect his perceptions, and leave sensible traces on his sentiments and reasonings. His course of procedure also is wrong. He starts from the burning postulates of his instincts, and approaches the subject from beneath, arguing from what has always been actual; whereas he should approach it from above, arguing from the commanding axioms of ethics to the ideal state which ought to become actual by progressive conquests over imperfection. Not history, but philosophy, is the arbiter of right, and furVOL. LXXI. 5TH S. VOL. IX. NO. III.

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nishes the true standard for the future of mankind. plausible plea which deduces the moral rightness of war from its historic universality is transparently sophistical, although so often brought forward and so unsuspiciously accepted. Must war be in accordance with the will of God, because no nation ever yet existed forty years without waging it? Not a day has ever passed without the occurrence of thefts, adulteries, and murders. Yet these crimes are opposed to the will of God. We believe in a providential order of the world, in spite of their constant recurrence. Certain inevitable attendants of a wild nomadic life are superseded and forgotten in the life of polished cities. The butterfly, soaring in sunshine and the azure, no longer wears the slough he cast as a slug. The perfected mammal sheds the provisional organs indispensable in the temporary types he passes through in his developmental ascension. So many necessities in the red epochs of vengeance and rapine will be left behind when men reach a fine civility, based on a scientific co-ordination of rights and duties, magnanimous sympathy, and gentle manners.

Besides, there is, to a humane thinker, not carried away by passionate sentimentalism and declamation, something painful in the way M. Proudhon verbally smooths over and lessens the evils of war, exaggerates and rouges its blessings, stimulating the passions of vanity, pride, ambition, and martial honor, casting comparative contempt on the far more sacred virtues of meekness, piety, self-denial, and quiet industry. No one from perusing his terse and complacent pages would ever imagine war to be the colossal agglomeration of calamity and sorrow which at the best it is. His tribunitian picture, so ornate and high-toned, contrasted with the sad and stern reality, affects us as though, when expecting to see the form of the dead exhibited in solemn shroud and pall, it were displayed tricked out with the tawdriness of a doll. M. Proudhon writes not as an impartial judge of peace and war; he appears as the zealous advocate of war. We shall not follow the details of his able but perverse volumes with hostile criticism. We prefer to take up the subject ourselves in a different light.

Our purpose is to consider war in its connection with human nature and the moral law; and especially the relations

of our present war to the social condition and ethical sentiments of the nineteenth century. The topic is certainly a timely one.

In the outset, our attention is called to the explaining ground of human war, the earlier vistas of creation that prophesied it, the darker elements of our nature that necessitated it. Throughout the vast forecourt and epochs of the animal kingdom, from the bugs of the pool to the leviathan, from the vermin of the soil to the lion, from the motes of the sunbeam to the pterodactyl, all the anterior races of beings were equipped with weapons, animated with aggressive and repelling instincts, and led to fight and prey on each other. Their whole existence was full of battling and cannibalism. When man appeared, made in the image of his Creator, it might be thought he was too loftily endowed for the enactment of such scenes; but in the lower range of his being he contained the sum of the passions and exposures of the foregone orders. He was mightily furnished with self-love, goaded by ravenous appetites, supplied with envy, cunning, and pride, capable of anger and hatred, moved by impulses to gnash and snatch, tear and smite. Here on this brute side of human nature rested the primitive possibility of war. Here in this fiend-spirit of human nature was that monster engendered, nourished, and cast forth. Man was morally imperfect, sometimes inspired with vindictive passions; therefore was war possible, and, under certain combinations of circumstances, inevitable. Accordingly, as soon as men were numerous enough to form tribes whose pursuits, whims, or desires might interfere, whose apparent interests might clash, armed strifes began. And the air has hurtled and rung with them ever since. Each generation has clothed the globe afresh in a livery of banners and garments rolled in blood. Not a season has passed in which victims by hundreds of hecatombs have not been offered up in the shambles of this war-fiend. Armies have lined all the centuries, and battles daily kept pace with the circling hours. When we think of the awfulness of deadly strife between men, and of its inseparable consequences, confronting brothers transformed into hyenas, furiously rending each other; the blasting of all the blessed affections of life; the destruction of property; the subversion and delay of civilization

and progress; the organized diffusion and perpetuation of barbarism, crime, and misery; the exchange of love, plenty, and happiness for hate, hardship, and wretched terrors, — and then remember, notwithstanding all this, how universally war has prevailed, we must be filled with astonishment and sadness. We must exclaim, in wonder, What delusion has stultified the minds, what rage has frenzied the breasts of men, that they should persist in such a course? Had they from the first been wise, and loved each other, studying their mutual weal, and toiling fraternally to develop their common resources and fulfil their united destiny, the entire earth might ere now have been made a paradise, all its children, cradled in peace and bliss, when their mortal hour came willingly passing from heaven below, through the gate of death, to heaven above. But, alas! inflamed with selfishness and animosity, an irrepressible mania for contention, they have destroyed their own happiness and transmitted an awful heritage of hostilities and woes to their posterity. War has been the chief business of mankind hitherto. They have invented an inexhaustible variety of weapons and engines of death, contrived constant occasions for fighting, filled the world with the convulsion of their conflicts, and the channel of the ages with a gurgling river of gore on which navies might ride. The cultivation of martial pursuits has beyond a question absorbed the thoughts, passions, energies, time, of our race, to a sad extent. It has been estimated that twenty thousand millions of human beings -twenty times the present population of the earthhave perished from war, under a concentration of outrage inflicted by the violence of man. The wickedness herein revealed, spurning every moral law, is only equalled by the folly, overlooking every self-interest, that could permit such a wholesale manufacture of woe to go on. The tremendous extent. and pertinacity of the habit of human slaughter in battle, its shocking criminality, and its incredible foolishness, when regarded from an advanced religious position, are three facts on the threshold of our subject calculated to appall every thoughtful man, and startle him into amazement.

As we come to the main body of facts, we are first confronted by the question of causes. The occasions of wars, the oppor

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