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fellow-creature is drowning in a river, or assailing us on the highway; every where, and under all circumstances, the duty remains.

Is killing an assailant, then, within or without the limits of this benevolence? As to the man, it is evident that no good-will is exercised towards him by shooting him through the head. Who indeed will dispute that, before we can destroy him, benevolence towards him must be excluded from our minds? We not only exercise no benevolence ourselves, but preclude him from receiving it from any human heart; and, which is a serious item in the account, we cut him off from all possibility of reformation. Is this an act that accords, and is congruous, with Christian love?

But an argument has been attempted here. "That we may kill the assailant," says Paley, "is evident in a state of nature, unless it can be shown that we are bound to prefer the aggressor's life to our own, that is to say, to love our enemy better than ourselves; which can never be a debt of justice, nor any where appears to be a duty of charity." The answer is, that, although we may not be required to love our enemy better than ourselves, we are required to love him as ourselves; and therefore, in the supposed case, it would still be a question equally balanced, which life ought to be sacrificed; for it is quite clear, that if we kill the assailant, we love him less than ourselves, which does seem to militate against a duty of charity. But the truth is, that he who, from motives of obedience to the will of God, spares the aggressor's life even to the endangering of his own, does exercise love both to the aggressor and to himself perfectly; to the aggressor, because by sparing his life, we give him the opportunity of repentance and amendment; to himself, because every act of obedience to God is perfect benevolence towards ourselves; it is consulting and promoting our most valuable interests; it is propitiating the favor of him who is emphatically "a rich rewarder." So that the question remains as before, not whether we shall love our enemy better than ourselves, but whether Christian principles are acted upon in destroying him; and if they are not, whether we should prefer Christianity to ourselves, whether we should be willing to lose our life for Christ's sake and the gospel's.

And, after all, if it were granted that a person is at liberty to take an assailant's life, in order to preserve his own, how is he to know, in the majority of instances, whether his own would be taken? When a man breaks into a person's house, and this person shoots him, we are not to be told that the man was killed "in defence of life." Or go a step further, and a step further still, by which the intention of the robber to commit personal violence, or inflict death, is more and more probable; you must at last shoot him in uncertainty whether your life was endangered or not. Besides, you can withdraw, you can fly. But perhaps you exclaim, "Fly! fly, and leave my property unprotected!" Yes, unless you mean to say that preservation of property, as well as preservation of life, makes it lawful to kill an offender. This were to adopt a new and a very different proposition; but a proposition

which I suspect cannot be separated in practice from the former. He who affirms that he may kill another in order to preserve his life, and may endanger his own life in order to protect his property, does in reality affirm that he may kill another in order to preserve his property. But such a proposition no one surely will tolerate. The laws of the land do not admit it, but require that we should be tender even of the murderer's life, and fly rather than destroy it.

The conclusion, then, is, that he who kills another, even in selfdefence, does not do it in the exercise of Christian dispositions, in conformity with the Christian law. But this is very far from concluding, that no resistance may be made to aggression. We may make, and ought to make, a great deal. It is the duty of the civil magistrate to repress the violence of one man towards another; and consequently it is the duty of the individual, when the civil power cannot operate, to endeavor to repress it himself. Many kinds of resistance to aggression come strictly within the fulfilment of the law of benevolence. He who, by securing or temporarily disabling a man, prevents him from committing an act of great turpitude, is certainly his benefactor; and if he be thus reserved for justice, the benevolence is great both to him and to the public. It is an act of much kindness to a bad man to secure him for the penalties of the law; or it would be such, if penal law were in the state in which it ought to be, and to which it appears to be making some approaches. It would then be very probable that the man would be reformed; and this is the greatest benefit both to him and the community.

The exercise of Christian forbearance towards violent men is not tantamount to an invitation of outrage. Cowardice is one thing; this forbearance is another. The man of true forbearance is of all men the least cowardly. It requires courage in a greater degree and of a higher order, to practise it when life is threatened, than to draw a sword, or fire a pistol. No; it is the peculiar privilege of Christian virtue to approve itself even to the bad. There is something in the nature of its calmness, and self-posBession, and forbearance, which obtains, nay, almost commands, regard and respect. How different the effect upon the violent tenants of Newgate, the hardihood of a turnkey, and the mild * courage of an Elizabeth Fry! Experience, incontestable experience has proved that the minds of few men are so depraved or desperate as to prevent them from being influenced by real Christian conduct. Let him who advocates taking the life of an aggressor, first show that all other means of safety are vain, that bad men, notwithstanding the exercise of true Christian forbearance, persist in their purposes of death; then he will have adduced an argument in favor of taking their lives, which will not indeed be conclusive, but which will approach nearer to conclusiveness than any that has yet been adduced.

AMERICAN PEACE SOCIETY, BOSTON, MASS.

WAR A TRIAL BY BATTLE.*

BY CHARLES SUMNER.

WAR is a public, armed contest between nations in order to establish justice between them. Lieber calls it "a mode of obtaining rights;" Vattel defines it as "that state in which we prosecute our rights by force ;" and Lord Bacon describes it as "one of the highest trials of right, when princes and states put themselves upon the justice of God for the deciding of their controversies by such success as it shall please him to give on either side." No war can arise among Christian nations except to determine an asserted right. The wars usually but falsely called defensive, are appeals for justice to force, endeavors to redress evils by force. They spring from the sentiment of vengeance or honor. They inflict evil for evil, and vainly essay to overcome evil by evil. If, as has been happily said, because a man refuses to pay a just debt, I go to his house, and beat him, that is not self-defense; but the object proposed in 1834 by war with France, was only to secure from her the payment of five millions of dollars. It is a mockery to call such contests defensive war.

But war is utterly ineffectual to secure or advance the object at which it aims. The misery it excites, contributes to no end, helps to establish no right, and therefore does in no respect determine justice between contending nations.

This inference results from the very nature of war. It is a resort to force, whereby each nation strives to overpower the other; a temporary adoption by men of the character of wild beasts, emulating their ferocity, rejoicing like them in blood, and seeking, as with a lion's paw, to hold an asserted right. This character of war is somewhat disguised in more recent days; but the early poets, in the unconscious simplicity of the world's childhood, make this strikingly apparent. All the heroes of Homer are likened in their rage to the ungovernable fury of animals; and Hector himself, in whom cluster the highest virtues of polished war, is called "the tamer of horses." Even our own Shakspeare makes Henry V. say to his troops,

"When the blast of war blows in our cars,
Then imitate the action of the tiger."

The fruitlessness and vanity of war, moreover, appear in its actual results. After long struggles, in which each nation has inflicted and received incalculable injury, peace has been gladly obtained on the basis of the condition of things before the warstatus ante bellum. Let me refer for an example to our last war with Great Britain, the professed object of which was to obtain

*This tract is taken from Mr. Sumner's Oration before the City Authorities of Boston, July 4, 1815, on "The True Grandeur of Nations."-G. C. B.

from the latter power a renunciation of her claim to impress our seamen. The greatest number of American seamen ever officially alleged to be compulsorily serving in the British navy, was about eight hundred. To overturn this injustice, the whole country was doomed, for more than three years, to the accursed blight of war. Our commerce was driven from the seas; the resources of the land were drained by taxation; villages on the Canadian frontier were laid in ashes; the metropolis of the Republic was captured, while gaunt distress raged every where within our borders. Weary with this rude trial, our Government appointed Commissioners to treat for Peace, under these instructions: "Your first duty will be to conclude peace with Great Britain, and you are authorized to do it, in case you obtain a satisfactory stipulation against impressment, one which shall secure under our flag protection to the crew. If this encroachment of Great Britain is not provided against, the United States have appealed to arms in vain." Afterwards, in despair of extorting from Great Britain a relinquishment of the unrighteous claim, and foreseeing only an accumulation of calamities from an inveterate prosecution of the war, our Government directed their negotiators, in concluding a Treaty of Peace, "to omit any stipulation on the subject of impressment." The instructions were obeyed, and the Treaty that once more restored to us the blessings of Peace, which we had rashly cast away, and which the country hailed with an intoxication of joy, contained no allusion to the subject of impressment; nor did it provide for the surrender of a single American sailor detained in the service of the British navy, and thus, by the confession of our own Government, "the United States had appealed to arms IN VAIN."

All this is the natural result of an appeal to war in order to establish justice. Justice implies the exercise of the judgment in the determination of right. Now, war not only supersedes the judgment, but delivers over the results to superiority of force, or to chance. Who can measure beforehand the currents of the heady fight? We speak of the chances of battle; even soldiers speak of it as a game. The Great Captain of our age, in a formal address to his officers on entering Russia, says: "In war, fortune has an equal share with ability in procuring success." The mighty victory of Marengo, the accident of an accident, wrested unexpectedly at the close of the day from a foe who at an earlier hour was successful, must have taught him the uncertainty of war. Afterwards, in the bitterness of his spirit, when his immense forces had been shivered, and his triumphant eagles driven back with broken wing, he exclaimed, in that remarkable conversation recorded by the Abbé de Pradt: "Well! this is war. High in the morning,-low enough at night. From a triumph to a fall is often but a step." The military historian of the Peninsular campaigns, savs: "Fortune always asserts her supremacy in war, and often from a slight mistake, such disastrous consequences flow, that in every age and in every nation, the uncertainty of wars has been proverbial." In another place, when considering the conduct of Wellington, he says: "A few hours' delay, an accident, a turn of

fortune, and he would have been foiled! Ay! but this is war, always dangerous and uncertain, an ever-rolling wheel, and armed with scythes." And can intelligent man look for justice to an ever-rolling wheel armed with scythes?

But the most interesting illustration of war as dependent upon chance, is to be found in the history of the private wars, and particularly of the judicial combat, or trial by battle, in the dark ages. The object was precisely the professed object of modern war, the determination of justice. It would be interesting and instructive to trace the curious analogies between this early ordeal by battle, and the great ordeal of war. Like the other ordeals, by burning ploughshares, by holding hot iron, by dipping the hand in hot water, or hot oil, they are both a presumptuous appeal to Providence, under an apprehension and hope, that Heaven will give the victory to him who has the right. The monstrous usage of trial by battle prevailed in the early modern centuries thoughout Europe; it was a part of the common law of England; and, though it fell into disuse, overruled by the advancing spirit of civilization, still, to the disgrace of the English law, it was not legislatively abolished, until in 1817 the right to it had been distinctly claimed in Westminster Hall. Abraham Thornton, on appeal against him for murder, when brought into court, pleaded as follows: "Not guilty, and I am ready to defend the same by my body;" and, thereupon taking off his glove, he threw it upon the floor of the court. The appellant, not choosing to submit to this trial, abandoned his proceedings; and in the next session of Parliament, trial by battle was abolished in England.

To an early monarch of France belongs the honor of first interposing the royal authority for the entire suppression within his jurisdiction of this impious usage, so universally adopted, so dear to the nobility, and so profoundly rooted in the institutions of the Feudal Age. The soul of St. Louis, tremblingly sensitive to questions of right, was shocked by the judicial combat. In his sight, it was a sin thus to tempt God by demanding of him a miracle whenever judgment was to be pronounced. In 1260 he assembled a parliament, where he issued the ordinance: " We forbid to all persons throughout our dominions the trial by battle; instead of battles, we establish proofs by witnesses; we do not take away the other good and loyal proofs which have been used in lay courts to this day; but THESE BATTLES WE ABOLISH IN OUR DOMINIONS FOREVER."

Honor and blessings attend the name of this truly Christian king, who began a long and illustrious reign by restoring a portion of the conquests of his predecessor, saying, "I know that the king of England has lost by conquest the land I hold; and the land I give him, I give only to put love between my children and his children, who are cousin-germans; and it seems to me that what I thus give, I employ to good purpose!" Honor to him who never grasped by force or cunning any new acquisition; who never sought advantage from the turmoils and dissensions of his neighbors, but studied to allay them; who, first of Christian princes, rebuked

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