plunder, and respects rules and usages only fitfully, and with small
attention to the possible effect of its disregard of them on the
general welfare. The man or the woman and, let us say, "the
mother"--since that is supposed to be, in this discussion, a term of
peculiar potency--who tries to exert a good influence on public
opinion on all these points, to teach the brotherhood of man as an
economical as well as a moral and religious truth; to spread the
belief that war between any two nations is a general calamity to the
civilized world; that it is as unchristian and inhuman to rouse
national combativeness as to rouse individual combativeness, as
absurd to associate honor with national wrong-doing as with
individual wrong-doing; and that peace among nations, as among
individuals, is, and can only be, the product of general reverence
for _law_ and general distrust of _feeling_--may rest assured that
he or she is doing far more to bring war to an end than can be done
by the most fervid accounts of the physical suffering it causes. It
will be a sorrowful day for any people when their men come to
consider death on the battle-field the greatest of evils, and the
human heart will certainly have sadly fallen off when those who stay
at home have neither gratitude nor admiration for those who shoulder
the musket, or are impressed less by the consideration that the
soldiers are going to kill others than by the consideration that
they are going to die themselves. There are things worth cherishing
even in war; and the seeds of what is worst in it are sown not in
camps, barracks, or forts, but in public meetings and newspapers and
legislatures and in literature.



CULTURE AND WAR