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PEACE AND WAR IN THE BALANCE[7]

When your Committee invited me to deliver the Moncure Conway address this year, I was even more surprised at their choice of subject than at their choice of person. For the chosen subject was Peace, and my chief study, interest, and means of livelihood for some twenty years past has been War. It seemed to me like inviting a butcher to lecture on vegetarianism. So I wrote, with regret, to refuse. But your Committee very generously repeated the invitation, giving me free permission to take my own line upon the subject; and then I perceived that you did not ask for the mere celebration of an established doctrine, but were still prepared to join in pursuit, following the track of reason wherever it might lead, as became the traditions of this classic building, which I sometimes think of as reason’s last lair. I perceived that what you demanded was not panegyric, or immutable commonplace, but, above all things, sincerity. And sincerity is a dog with nose to the ground, uncertain of the trail, often losing the scent, often harking back, but possessed by an honest determination to hunt down the truth, if by any means it can be caught.

It is one of my many regrets for wasted opportunity that I never heard Moncure Conway; but, with a view to this address, I have lately read a good deal of his writings. Especially I have read the Autobiography, an attractive record and commentary on the intellectual history of rapidly-changing years, most of which I remember. On the question of peace Moncure Conway was uncompromising–very nearly uncompromising. Many Americans feel taller when they think of Lexington and the shot that echoed round the world. Moncure Conway only saw lynchers in the champions of freedom who flung the tea-chests into the sea; and in the War of Independence he saw nothing but St. George Washington spearing a George the Third dragon.[8] He quotes with approval the saying of Quaker Mifflin to Washington: “General, the worst peace is better than the best war.”[9] Many Americans regard the Civil War between North and South with admiration as a stupendous contest either for freedom and unity, or for self-government and good manners. Moncure Conway was strongly and consistently opposed to it. The question of slavery did not affect his opposition. He thought few men had wrought so much evil as John Brown of Harper’s Ferry, whose soul marched with the Northern Armies.[10] “I hated violence more than slavery,” he wrote, “and much as I disliked President Buchanan, I thought him right in declining to coerce the seceding States.”[11] Just before the war began, he wrote in a famous pamphlet: “War is always wrong; it is because the victories of Peace require so much more courage than those of war that they are rarely won.”[12] “I see in the Union War,” he wrote, “a great catastrophe.” “Alas! the promises of the sword are always broken–always.” And in the concluding pages of his Autobiography, as though uttering his final message to the world, he wrote:

“There can arise no important literature, nor art, nor
real freedom and happiness, among any people until they
feel their uniform a livery, and see in every battlefield
an inglorious arena of human degradation…. The only
cause that can uplift the genius of a people as the
anti-slavery cause did in America is the war against war.”

For the very last words of his Autobiography he wrote:

“And now, at the end of my work, I offer yet a new plan
for ending war–namely, that the friends of peace and justice
shall insist on a demand that every declaration of war shall
be regarded as a sentence of death by one people on another;
and shall be made only after a full and formal judicial
inquiry and trial, at which the accused people shall be
fairly represented…. The meanest prisoner cannot be
executed without a trial. A declaration of war is the
most terrible of sentences: it sentences a people to be
slain and mutilated, their women to be widowed, their
children orphaned, their cities burned, their commerce
destroyed. The real motives of every declaration of war
are unavowed and unavowable. Let them be dragged into the
light! No war would ever occur after a fair judicial
trial by a tribunal in any country open to its citizens.