But let us bring this case still nearer home.  Let it be known to-morrow that the people of Boston or New York have adopted the strictly non-resisting principle, and that hereafter they will rely solely on the consciences of men for justice; let it be proclaimed throughout the whole extent of our Union, and throughout the world, that you have destroyed your jails and houses of correction, abolished your police and executive law officers, that courts may decide justice but will be allowed no force to compel respect to their decisions, that you will no longer employ walls, and bars, and locks, to secure your property and the virtue and lives of your children; but that you will trust solely for protection to “the law of active benevolence.”  Think you that the thieves, and robbers, and murderers of Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and New Orleans, and the cities of the old world, will, on this account, refrain from molesting the peace of New York and Boston, and that the wicked and abandoned men now in these cities, will be the more likely to turn from the evil of their ways?

Assuredly, if this “law of active benevolence,” as Dr. Wayland denominates the rule of non-resistance, will prevent nations from attacking the harmless and defenceless, it will be still more likely to prevent individuals from the like aggressions; for the moral sense is less active in communities than where the responsibility is individual and direct.

Throughout this argument Dr. Wayland assumes that all wars are wars of aggression, waged for “plunder” or “glory,” or through “hatred” or “revenge,” whereas such is far from being true.  He indeed sometimes speaks of war as being generally of this character; at others he speaks of it as being always undertaken either from a spirit of aggression or retaliation.  Take either form of his argument, and the veriest schoolboy would pronounce it unsound:  viz.,

All wars are undertaken either for aggression or retaliation;

Aggression and retaliation are forbidden by God’s laws;—­therefore,

All wars are immoral and unjustifiable.

Or,

Wars are generally undertaken either for aggression or retaliation;

Aggression and retaliation are forbidden by God’s laws—­therefore,

All wars are immoral and unjustifiable.

VI.  “Let any man reflect upon the amount of pecuniary expenditure, and the awful waste of human life, which the wars of the last hundred years have occasioned, and then we will ask him whether it be not evident, that the one-hundredth part of this expense and suffering, if employed in the honest effort to render mankind wiser and better, would, long before this time, have banished wars from the earth, and rendered the civilized world like the garden of Eden?  If this be true, it will follow that the cultivation of a military spirit is injurious to a community, inasmuch as it aggravates the source of the evil, the corrupt passions of the human breast, by the very manner in which it attempts to correct the evil itself.”