Chapter 4

I will conclude this Postscript with quotations from three writers of the present day, who may be fairly taken to represent the three distinct classes of the leaders of knowledge, and who will show what is thought of the feasibility of putting an end to war,--the Utilitarian, or those who are all for the tangible and material--the Metaphysical, or those who recognize, in addition, the spiritual and imaginative wants of mankind--and lastly (in no offensive sense), the Men of the World, whose opinion will have the greatest weight of all with the incredulous, and whose speaker is a soldier to boot, and a man who evidently sees fair play to all the weaknesses as well as strengths of our nature.

The first quotation is from the venerable Mr Bentham, a man who certainly lost sight of no existing or possible phase of society, such as the ordinary disputants on this subject contemplate. I venture to think him not thoroughly philosophical on the point, especially in what he says in reproach of men educated to think differently from himself. But the passage will show the growth of opinion in a practical and highly influential quarter.

"Nothing can be worse," says Mr Bentham, "than the general feeling on the subject of war. The Church, the State, the ruling few, the subject many, all seem to have combined, in order to patronise vice and crime in their very widest sphere of evil. Dress a man in particular garments, call him by a particular name, and he shall have authority, on divers occasions, to commit every species of offence, to pillage, to murder, to destroy human felicity, and, for so doing, he shall be rewarded.

"Of all that is pernicious in admiration, the admiration of heroes is the most pernicious; and how delusion should have made us admire what virtue should teach us to hate and loathe, is among the saddest evidences of human weakness and folly. The crimes of heroes seem lost in the vastness of the field they occupy. A lively idea of the mischief they do, of the misery they create, seldom penetrates the mind through the delusions with which thoughtlessness and falsehood have surrounded their names and deeds. Is it that the magnitude of the evil is too gigantic for entrance? We read of twenty thousand men killed in a battle, with no other feeling than that 'it was a glorious victory.' Twenty thousand, or ten thousand, what reck we of their sufferings? The hosts who perished are evidence of the completeness of the triumph; and the completeness of the triumph is the measure of merit, and the glory of the conqueror. Our schoolmasters, and the immoral books they so often put into our hands, have inspired us with an affection for heroes; and the hero is more heroic in proportion to the numbers of the slain--add a cypher, not one iota is added to our disapprobation. Four or two figures give us no more sentiment of pain than one figure, while they add marvellously to the grandeur and splendour of the victor. Let us draw forth one individual from those thousands, or tens of thousands,--his leg has been shivered by one ball, his jaw broken by another--he is bathed in his own blood, and that of his fellows--yet he lives, tortured by thirst, fainting, famishing. He is but one of the twenty thousand--one of the actors and sufferers in the scene of the hero's glory--and of the twenty thousand there is scarcely one whose suffering or death will not be the centre of a circle of misery. Look again, admirers of that hero! Is not this wretchedness? Because it is repeated ten, ten hundred, ten thousand times, is not this wretchedness?

"The period will assuredly arrive, when better instructed generations will require all the evidence of history to credit, that, in times deeming themselves enlightened, human beings should have been honoured with public approval, in the very proportion of the misery they caused, and the mischiefs they perpetrated. They will call upon all the testimony which incredulity can require, to persuade them that, in passed ages, men there were--men, too, deemed worthy of popular recompense--who, for some small pecuniary retribution, hired themselves out to do any deeds of pillage, devastation, and murder, which might be demanded of them. And, still more will it shock their sensibilities to learn, that such men, such men-destroyers, were marked out as the eminent and the illustrious--as the worthy of laurels and monuments--of eloquence and poetry. In that better and happier epoch, the wise and the good will be busied in hurling into oblivion, or dragging forth for exposure to universal ignominy and obloquy, many of the heads we deem _heroic_; while the true fame and the perdurable glories will be gathered around the creators and diffusers of happiness."--_Deontology._

Our second quotation is from one of the subtilest and most universal thinkers now living--Thomas Carlyle--chiefly known to the public as a German scholar and the friend of Goethe, but deeply respected by other leading intellects of the day, as a man who sees into the utmost recognized possibilities of knowledge. See what he thinks of war, and of the possibility of putting an end to it. We forget whether we got the extract from the _Edinburgh_ or the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, having made it sometime back and mislaid the reference; and we take a liberty with him in mentioning his name as the writer, for which his zeal in the cause of mankind will assuredly pardon us.

"The better minds of all countries," observes Mr Carlyle, "begin to understand each other, and, which follows naturally, to love each other and help each other, by whom ultimately all countries in all their proceedings are governed.

"Late in man's history, yet clearly, at length, it becomes manifest to the dullest, that mind is stronger than matter--that mind is the creator and shaper of matter--that not brute force, but only persuasion and faith, is the King of this world. The true poet, who is but an inspired thinker, is still an Orpheus whose lyre tames the savage beasts, and evokes the dead rocks to fashion themselves into palaces and stately inhabited cities. It has been said, and may be repeated, that literature is fast becoming all in all to us--our Church, our Senate, our whole social constitution. The true Pope of Christendom is not that feeble old man in Rome, nor is its autocrat the Napoleon, the Nicholas, with its half million even of obedient bayonets; such autocrat is himself but a more cunningly-devised bayonet and military engine in the hands of a mightier than he. The true autocrat, or Pope, is that man, the real or seeming wisest of the last age; crowned after death; who finds his hierarchy of gifted authors, his clergy of assiduous journalists: whose decretals, written, not on parchment, but on the living souls of men, it were an inversion of the laws of nature to disobey. In these times of ours, all intellect has fused itself into literature; literature--printed thought, is the molten sea and wonder-bearing chaos, in which mind after mind casts forth its opinion, its feeling, to be molten into the general mass, and to be worked there; interest after interest is engulfed in it, or embarked in it; higher, higher it rises round all the edifices of existence; they must all be molten into it, and anew bodied forth from it, or stand unconsumed among its fiery surges. Woe to him whose edifice is not built of true asbest, and on the everlasting rock, but on the false sand and the drift-wood of accident, and the paper and parchment of antiquated habit! For the power or powers exist not on our earth that can say to that sea--roll back, or bid its proud waves be still.

"What form so omnipotent an element will assume--how long it will welter to and fro as a wild democracy, a wilder anarchy--what constitution and organization it will fashion for itself, and for what depends on it in the depths of time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture, wherein brightest hope is not unmingled with fearful apprehensions and awe at the boundless unknown. The more cheering is this one thing, which we do see and know--that its tendency is to a universal European commonweal; that the wisest in all nations will communicate and co-operate; whereby Europe will again have its true Sacred College and council of Amphictyons; wars will become rarer, less inhuman; and in the course of centuries, such delirious ferocity in nations, as in individuals it already is, may be proscribed and become obsolete for ever."

My last and not least conclusive extract (for it shows the actual hold which these speculations have taken of the minds of practical men--of men out in the world, and even of _soldiers_) is from a book popular among all classes of readers--the _Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau_, written by Major Sir Francis Head. What he says of one country's educating another, by the natural progress of books and opinion, and of the effect which this is likely to have upon governments even as remote and unwilling as Russia, is particularly worthy of attention.

The author is speaking of some bathers at whom he had been looking, and of a Russian Prince, who lets us into some curious information respecting the leading-strings in which grown gentlemen are kept by despotism:--

"For more than half an hour I had been indolently watching this amphibious scene, when the landlord entering my room said, that the Russian Prince, G----n, wished to speak to me on some business; and the information was scarcely communicated, when I perceived his Highness standing at the threshold of my door. With the attention due to his rank, I instantly begged he would do me the honour to walk in; and, after we had sufficiently bowed to each other, and that I had prevailed on my guest to sit down, I gravely requested him, as I stood before him, to be so good as to state in what way I could have the good fortune to render him any service. The Prince very briefly replied, that he had called upon me, considering that I was the person in the hotel best capable (he politely inclined his head) of informing him by what route it would be most adviseable for him to proceed to London, it being his wish to visit my country.

"In order at once to solve this very simple problem, I silently unfolded and spread out upon the table my map of Europe; and each of us, as we leant over it, placing a forefinger on or near Wiesbaden (our eyes being fixed upon Dover), we remained in this reflecting attitude for some seconds, until the Prince's finger first solemnly began to trace its route. In doing this, I observed that his Highness's hand kept swerving far into the Netherlands, so, gently pulling it by the thumb towards Paris, I used as much force as I thought decorous, to induce it to advance in a straight line; however, finding my efforts ineffectual, I ventured with respectful astonishment, to ask, 'Why travel by so uninteresting a route'?

"The Prince at once acknowledged that the route I had recommended would, by visiting Paris, afford him the greatest pleasure; but he frankly told me that no Russian, not even a personage of his rank, could enter that capital, without first obtaining a written permission from the Emperor.

"These words were no sooner uttered, than I felt my fluent civility suddenly begin to coagulate; the attention I paid my guest became forced and unnatural. I was no longer at my ease; and though I bowed, strained, and endeavoured to be, if possible, more respectful than ever, yet I really could hardly prevent my lips from muttering aloud, that I had sooner die a homely English peasant than live to be a Russian prince!--in short, his Highness's words acted upon my mind like thunder upon beer. And, moreover, I could almost have sworn that I was an old lean wolf, contemptuously observing a bald ring rubbed by the collar, from the neck of a sleek, well-fed mastiff dog; however, recovering myself, I managed to give as much information as it was in my humble power to afford; and my noble guest then taking his departure, I returned to my open window, to give vent in solitude (as I gazed upon the horse bath) to my own reflection upon the subject.

"Although the petty rule of my life has been never to trouble myself about what the world calls 'politics'--(a fine word, by the by, much easier expressed than understood)--yet, I must own, I am always happy when I see a nation enjoying itself, and melancholy when I observe any large body of people suffering pain or imprisonment. But of all sorts of imprisonment, that of the mind is, to my taste, the most cruel; and, therefore, when I consider over what immense dominions the Emperor of Russia presides, and how he governs, I cannot help sympathizing most sincerely with those innocent sufferers, who have the misfortune to be born his subjects; for if a Russian Prince be not freely permitted to go to Paris, in what a melancholy state of slavery and debasement must exist the minds of what we call the lower classes?

"As a sovereign remedy for this lamentable political disorder, many very sensible people in England prescribe, I know, that we ought to have resource to arms. I must confess, however, it seems to me that one of the greatest political errors England could commit would be to declare, or to join in declaring, war with Russia; in short, that an appeal to brute force would, at this moment, be at once most unscientifically to stop an immense moral engine, which, if left to its work, is quite powerful enough, without bloodshed, to gain for humanity, at no expense at all, its object. The individual who is, I conceive, to overthrow the Emperor of Russia--who is to direct his own legions against himself--who is to do what Napoleon had at the head of his great army failed to effect, is the little child, who, lighted by the single wick of a small lamp, sits at this moment perched above the great steam press of the 'Penny Magazine,' feeding it, from morning till night, with blank papers, which, at almost every pulsation of the engine, comes out stamped on both sides with engravings, and with pages of plain, useful, harmless knowledge, which, by making the lower orders acquainted with foreign lands, foreign productions, various states of society, &c., tend practically to inculcate 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace--good will towards men.' It has already been stated, that what proceeds from this press is now greedily devoured by the people of Europe; indeed, even at Berlin, we know it can hardly be reprinted fast enough.

"This child, then,--'this sweet little cherub that sits up aloft,'--is the only army that an enlightened country like ours should, I humbly think, deign to oppose to one who reigns in darkness--who trembles at day-light, and whose throne rests upon ignorance and despotism. Compare this mild, peaceful intellectual policy, with the dreadful, savage alternative of going to war, and the difference must surely be evident to everyone. In the former case, we calmly enjoy, first of all, the pleasing reflection, that our country is generously imparting to the nations of Europe the blessing she is tranquilly deriving from the purification of civilization to her own mind;--far from wishing to exterminate, we are gradually illuminating the Russian peasant, we are mildly throwing a gleam of light upon the fetters of the Russian Prince; and surely every well-disposed person must see, that if we will only have patience, the result of this noble, temperate conduct, must produce all that reasonable beings can desire."--_Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau_, p. 164.

By the 'Penny Magazine,' our author means, of course, not only that excellent publication, but all cheaply-diffused knowledge--all the tranquil and enlightening deeds of "Captain Pen" in general--of whom it is pleasant to see the gallant Major so useful a servant, the more so from his sympathies with rank and the aristocracy. But "Pen" will make it a matter of necessity, by and by, for all ranks to agree with him, in vindication of their own wit and common sense; and when once this necessity is felt, and fastidiousness shall find out that it will be considered "absurd" to lag behind in the career of knowledge and the common good, the cause of the world is secure.

May princes and people alike find it out by the kindliest means, and without further violence. May they discover that no one set of human beings, perhaps no single individual, can be thoroughly secure and content, or enabled to work out his case with equal reasonableness, _till all are so_,--a subject for reflection, which contains, we hope, the beneficent reason _why all are restless_. The solution of the problem is co-operation--the means of solving it is the Press. If the Greeks had had a press, we should probably have heard nothing of the inconsiderate question, which demands, why they, with all their philosophy, did not alter the world. They had not the means. They could not command a general hearing. Neither had Christianity come up, to make men think of one another's wants, as well as of their own accomplishments. Modern times possess those means, and inherit that divine incitement. May every man exert himself accordingly, and show himself a worthy inhabitant of this beautiful and most capable world!

THE END.

LONDON: Printed by C. and W. REYNELL, Little Pulteney Street.

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Transcriber's Note: On page 67, a quote begins but has no end that this transcriber can find. It was retained as printed. ("Try a reasonable condition)

End of Project Gutenberg's Captain Sword and Captain Pen, by Leigh Hunt