VI. "Let any man reflect upon the amount of pecuniary expenditure, and
the awful waste of human life, which the wars of the last hundred years
have occasioned, and then we will ask him whether it be not evident,
that the one-hundredth part of this expense and suffering, if employed
in the honest effort to render mankind wiser and better, would, long
before this time, have banished wars from the earth, and rendered the
civilized world like the garden of Eden? If this be true, it will follow
that the cultivation of a military spirit is injurious to a community,
inasmuch as it aggravates the source of the evil, the corrupt passions
of the human breast, by the very manner in which it attempts to correct
the evil itself."

Much has been said to show that war begets immorality, and that the
cultivation of the military spirit has a corrupting influence on
community. And members of the clergy and of the bar have not
unfrequently so far forgotten, if not truth and fact, at least the
common courtesies and charities of life, as to attribute to the military
profession an unequal share of immorality and crime. We are declared not
only parasites on the body politic, but professed violators of God's
laws--men so degraded, though unconsciously, that "in the pursuit of
justice we renounce the human character and assume that of the beasts;"
it is said that "murder, robbery, rape, arson, theft, if only plaited
with the soldier's garb, go unwhipped of justice."[1] It has never been
the habit of the military to retort these charges upon the other
professions. We prefer to leave them unanswered. If demagogues on the
"stump," or in the legislative halls, or in their Fourth of-July
addresses, can find no fitter subjects "to point a moral or adorn a
tale," we must be content to bear their misrepresentations and abuse.