's
sake); out of which, or notwithstanding it, good is worked, and to be
worked, perhaps, finally to the abolition of evil. But whether this
consummation be possible or not, and even if the dark horrors of evil be
necessary towards the enjoyment of the light of good, still the horror
must be maintained, where the object is really horrible; otherwise, we
but the more idly resist the contrast, if necessary--and, what is
worse, endanger the chance of melioration, if possible.

Did war appear to me an inevitable evil, I should be one of the last men
to shew it in any other than its holiday clothes. I can appeal to
writings before the public, to testify whether I am in the habit of
making the worst of anything, or of not making it yield its utmost
amount of good. My inclinations, as well as my reason, lie all that way.
I am a passionate and grateful lover of all the beauties of the
universe, moral and material; and the chief business of my life is to
endeavour to give others the like fortunate affection. But, on the same
principle, I feel it my duty to look evil in the face, in order to
discover if it be capable of amendment; and I do not see why the
miseries of war are to be spared this interrogation, simply because they
are frightful and enormous. Men get rid of smaller evils which lie in
their way--nay, of great ones; and there appears to be no reason why
they should not get rid of the greatest, if they will but have the
courage. We have abolished inquisitions and the rack, burnings for
religion, burnings for witchcraft, hangings for forgery (a great triumph
in a commercial country), much of the punishment of death in some
countries, all of it in others. Why not abolish war? Mr Wordsworth
writes no odes to tell us that the Inquisition was God's daughter;
though Lope de Vega, who was one of its officers, might have done
so--and Mr Wordsworth too, had he lived under its dispensation. Lope de
Vega, like Mr Wordsworth and Mr Southey, was a good man, as well as a
celebrated poet: and we will concede to his memory what the English
poets will, perhaps, not be equally disposed to grant (for they are
severe on the Romish faith) that even the Inquisition, _like War_, might
possibly have had some utility in its evil, were it no other than a
hastening of Christianity by its startling contradictions of it. Yet it
has gone. The Inquisition, as War may be hereafter, is no more. Daughter
if it was of the Supreme Good, it was no immortal