The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 | Page 3

capricious wars, wars undertaken for no fit cause, wars with scarce a principle on either side. Such have often been king's wars, begun in folly, conducted in vanity, ended in shame, wars for the ambition of some crowned scoundrel, who rides a patient people till he drives them mad. And even such wars have their uses. They are not wholly evil. Alexander's, the maddest wars of all, and those of his successors, the most stupid and brutal ever fought, even they had their uses. Our war with poor Mexico, even Louis Bonaparte's, was not wholly evil.
But there are wars, again, that are not capricious, that are simply necessary, unavoidable, as life, death, or judgment, wars where the choice is to see right trampled out of sight or to fight for it, where truth and justice are crushed unless the sword be grasped and used, where law and civilization and Christianity are assailed by savagery, brutality, and devilishness, and only the true bullet and the cold steel are received in the discussion. These are the Peoples' wars. In them nations arm. Generations swarm to their battle fields. They are landmarks in the world's advancement. For victories in them men sing Te Deums throughout the ages. The heroes, who fell in them, loom through the haze of time like demigods.
On the plains of Tours, when the Moslem tide, that swept on to overwhelm in ruin Christian Europe, was met, and stemmed, and turned by Charles Martel, and, breaking into foam against the iron breasts of his stalwart Franks, was whirled away into the darkness like spray before the tempest, the Hammer-man did a work that day that, till the end of time, a world will thank Heaven for, as he thanked it in the hour of victory.
And when his greater grandson, creator, guide, and guardian of modern civilization, paced with restless, ever-present steps, around the borders of that small world of light which he had built up, half blindly, in the overwhelming dark, and with two-handed blows beat back, with the iron mace of Germany, the savage assaults of Saracen and Sclave, of black Dane and brutal Wendt, and smote on till he died smiting, for order, and law, and faith, and so saved Europe, and, let us humbly hope, his own rude but true soul alive! are not the thanks of all the world well due, that Karl der Grosse was no non-resistant, but a great, broad-shouldered, royal soldier, who wore the imperial purple by right of a moat imperial sword?
There are wars like these, that, as the world goes, are inevitable. Some wrong undertakes to rule. Some lie challenges sovereignty. Some mere brutality or heathenism faces order, civilization, and law. There is no choice in the matter then. The wrong, the lie, the brutality, the barbarism must go down. If they listen to reason, well. If they can be only preached or lectured into dying peaceably, and getting quietly buried, it is an excellent consummation. If they do not, if they try conclusions, as they are far more apt to do, if they come on with brute force, there is no alternative. They must be met by force. They must get the only persuasion that can influence them--hard knocks, and plenty of them, well delivered, straight at the heart.
Wars so undertaken, under a divine necessity, and with a divine sadness, too, by a patient people, whose business is not brutal fighting, but peaceful working, wars of this sort, in the world's long history, are scarce evils at all, and, even in the day of their wrath, bring compensative blessings. They may be fierce and terrible, they may bring wretchedness and ruin, they may 'demoralize' armies and people, they may be dreadful evils, and leave long trails of desolation, but they are none the less wars for victories in which men will return thanks while the world shall stand. The men who fall in such wars, receive the benedictions of their kind. The people that, with patient pain, stands and fights in them, bleeding drop by drop, and conquering or dying, inch by inch, but never yielding, because it feels the deathless value of the cause, the brave, calm people, who so fight is crowned forever on the earth.
From our paradise of a lamb-like world this nation was awakened, three years ago, by a cannon shot across Charleston harbor. The fools who fired it knew not what they did, perhaps. They thought to open fire on a poor old fort and its handful of a garrison. They did open fire on civilization, on order, on law, on the world's progress, on the hopes of man. There, at last, we were brought face to face with hard facts. Talk, in Congress, or out, was at an end. Voting and balloting, and speech-making