dead in Great Britain you
will not understand us, but if the love of liberty lives as it once
lived, and has worthy successors of those renowned men that were our
ancestors as much as yours, and whose example and principles we inherit
as so much seed corn in a new and fertile land, then you will understand
our firm invincible determination to fight this war through at all
hazards and at every cost.

ABOLITION OF WAR[34]

CHARLES SUMNER

Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is
not dishonorable? The true honor of a nation is conspicuous only in
deeds of justice and beneficence, securing and advancing human
happiness. In the clear eye of that Christian judgment which must yet
prevail, vain are the victories of war, infamous its spoils. He is the
benefactor, and worthy of honor, who carries comfort to wretchedness,
dries the tear of sorrow, relieves the unfortunate, feeds the hungry,
clothes the naked, does justice, enlightens the ignorant, unfastens the
fetters of the slave, and finally, by virtuous genius, in art,
literature, science, enlivens and exalts the hours of life, or by
generous example, inspires a love for God and man. This is the Christian
hero; this is the man of honor in a Christian land. He is no benefactor,
nor worthy of honor, whatever his worldly renown, whose life is absorbed
in feats of brute force, who renounces the great law of Christian
brotherhood, whose vocation is blood.

Fellow-citizens, this criminal and impious custom of war, which all
condemn in the case of individuals, is openly avowed by our own country,
and by other countries of the great Christian Federation, nay, that it
is expressly established by international law, as the proper mode of
determining justice between nations,--while the feats of hardihood by
which it is waged, and the triumphs of its fields, are exalted beyond
all other labors, whether of learning, industry, or benevolence, as the
wellspring of glory. Alas! upon our own heads be the judgment of
barbarism which we pronounce upon those who have gone before!

Who has taught you, O man! thus to find glory in an act, performed by a
nation, which you condemn as a crime or a barbarism, when committed by
an individual? In what vain conceit of wisdom and virtue do you find
this incongruous morality? Where is it declared that God, who is no
respecter of persons, is a respecter of multitudes? Whence do you draw
these partial laws of an i