Chapter XIX: Peace and War

“_I do not like to speak to the Peace Society, if so I am to restrain myself in so extreme a privilege as the use of sword and bullet. For the peace of a man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not peace, but a canting impotence; but with knife and bullet in my hands, if I from greater bravery and honor cast them aside, then I know the glory of peace._”

In 1838 Emerson delivered a lecture on War which has furnished many excellent texts for thoroughgoing pacifists. And yet in the war for the preservation of the Union, he threw himself unreservedly into the conflict. At first sight, it might seem that under the stress of circumstances he had given up his earlier convictions.

Yet the words which I have placed at the head of this chapter were written at the time he was making his plea for universal peace. Emerson’s position was practically unchanged by the events of his time. He was a believer in peace, but it was the peace of the strong man armed. It was peace established and maintained by men who were not to be coerced. Having demonstrated that they were able to take care of themselves they could lay aside their arms and trust to moral force. His lecture was in praise of the glory of peace which he believed in the end would supersede the meretricious glories of war.

“War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision at critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it lives, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it. What does war, beginning from the lowest races and reaching up to man, signify? Is it not manifest that it covers a great and beneficent principle which nature has deeply at heart? What is that principle? It is self help. Nature implants with life the instinct of self help, perpetual struggle to be, to resist opposition, to attain to freedom and the security of a permanent, self-defended being, and to each creature these objects are made so dear that it risks its life continually in the struggles for these ends.”

But because war has had such uses in the past, does it follow that it must continue indefinitely?

“At a certain stage of his progress a man fights if he be of sound mind and body. At a higher stage he makes no offensive demonstration, but he is alert to repel injury and of an unconquerable heart. At a still higher he comes into the region of holiness, passion has passed from him, his warlike nature is all converted into an active medicinal principle, he sacrifices himself, and accepts with alacrity wearisome tasks of denial and charity; but being attacked he bears it and turns the other cheek, as one engaged throughout his being, no longer to the service of the individual but to the common soul of man.”

There are passages in praise of non-resistance which sound very much like the words of doctrinaire pacifists. But it is the non-resistance of the soldier who with arms in his hand will not use them to revenge a private wrong.

“The cause of peace is not the cause of cowardice. If peace is sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of the luxurious and the timid, it is a shame and the peace will be base. War is better and the peace will be broken. If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men who have come up to the same height of the hero, namely the will to carry their life in their hands, and have gone a step beyond the hero and will not seek another man’s life--men who by their intellectual insight or else by their moral education attained such perception of their own intrinsic worth that they do not think property or their own body a sufficient good to be saved by such dereliction of principle as treating a man like a sheep.”

War is barbarous, peace has possibilities of heroic achievement, but are these not circumstances under which the good man must fight? In 1838 Emerson answered, “A wise man will never impawn his future being and action, and decide before-hand what he shall do in a given extreme event. Nature and God will instruct him what to do.”

When the extreme event came he had no hesitancy. In 1862 he wrote, “It is wonderful to see the unseasonable senility of the Peace Party through all its masks, blinding their eyes to the main feature of the war, namely its inevitableness.”

Heroism is after all the same whether in peace or in war. It is the deliberate choice of the highest service possible under the circumstances. He thinks of the soldier who when war is inevitable obeys the call of duty as one who is sacrificed to make peace possible.

“But best befriended of the God
He who, in evil times,
Warned by an inward voice,
Heeds not the darkness and the dread,
Biding by his rule and choice,
Feeling only the fiery thread
Leading over heroic ground,
Walled with mortal terror round,
To the aim which him allures,
And the sweet heaven his deed secures.
Peril around, all else appalling,
Cannon in front and leaden rain,
Him duty through the clarion calling
To the van called not in vain.

“Stainless soldier on the walls,
Knowing this,--and knows no more,--
Whoso fights, and whoso falls,
Justice triumphs ever more.”