mpartial God? Man is immortal; but nations are
mortal. Man has a higher destiny than nations. Can nations be less
amenable to the supreme moral law? Each individual is an atom of the
mass. Must not the mass, in its conscience, be like the individuals of
which it is composed? Shall the mass, in relation with other masses, do
what individuals in relation with each other may not do? As in the
physical creation, so in the moral, there is but one rule for the
individual and the mass. It was the lofty discovery of Newton, that the
simple law which determines the fall of an apple prevails everywhere
throughout the universe, reaching from earth to heaven, and controlling
the infinite motions of the spheres. So, with equal scope, another
simple law, the law of right, which binds the individual, binds also two
or three when gathered together, binds conventions and congregations of
men, binds villages, towns, and cities, binds states, nations, and
races, clasps the whole human family in its embrace, and binds in
self-imposed bonds, a just and omnipotent God.

Stripped of all delusive apology and tried by that comprehensive law
under which nations are set to the bar like common men, war falls from
glory into barbarous guilt, taking its place among bloody
transgressions, while its flaming honors are turned into shame. Painful
to existing prejudice as this may be, we must learn to abhor it, as we
abhor similar transgressions by vulgar offenders. Every word of
reprobation which the enlightened conscience now fastens upon the savage
combatant in trial by battle, or which it applies to the unhappy being
who in murderous duel takes the life of his fellow-man, belongs also to
the nation that appeals to war. Amidst the thunders of Sinai God
declared, "Thou shalt not kill"; and the voice of these thunders, with
this commandment, is prolonged to our own day in the echoes of Christian
churches. What mortal shall restrict the application of these words? Who
on earth is empowered to vary or abridge the commandments of God? Who
shall presume to declare that this injunction was directed, not to
nations, but to individuals only; not to many, but to one only; that one
man shall not kill but that many may; that one man shall not slay in
duel, but that a nation may slay a multitude in the duel of war; that
each individual is forbidden to destroy the life of a single human
being, but that a nation is not forbidden to cut off by the sword a
whole peopl