Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/72

60 have stood and seen it all; and then that the voice of the whole nation had come up to them and said, "This is your work, not ours. Certainly we will not shed our blood, nor our brothers' blood, to get never so much slave territory. It was bad enough to fight in the cause of freedom. In the cause of slavery—God forgive us for that! We have trusted you thus far, but please God we never will trust you again."

Let us now look at the effect of this war on the morals of the nation. The Revolutionary war was the contest for a great idea. If there were ever a just war it was that—a contest for national existence. Yet it brought out many of the worst qualities of human nature on both sides, as well as some of the best. It helped make a Washington, it is true, but a Benedict Arnold likewise. A war with a powerful nation, terrible as it must be, yet develops the energy of the people, promotes self-denial, and helps the growth of some qualities of a high order. It had this effect in England from 1798 to 1815. True, England for that time became a despotism, but the self-consciousness of the nation, its self-denial and energy, were amazingly stimulated; the moral effect of that series of wars was doubtless far better than of the infamous contest which she has kept up against Ireland for many years. Let us give even war its due: when a great boy fights with an equal, it may develop his animal courage and strength—for he gets as bad as he gives; but when he only beats a little boy that cannot pay back his blows, it is cowardly as well as cruel, and doubly debasiag to the conqueror. Mexico was no match for America. We all knew that very well before the war began. When a nation numbering 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 of people can be successfully invaded by an army of 75,000 men, two-thirds of them volunteers, raw, and undisciplined ; when the invaders with less than 15,000 can march two hundred miles into the very heart of the hostile country, and with less than 6000 can take and hold the capital of the nation, a city of 100,000 or 200,000 inhabitants, and dictate a peace, taking as much territory as they will—it is hardly fair to dignify such operations with the name of war. The little good which a long contest with an equal might produce in the