Newman reminds us that it is only within very recent years "that the atrocious system of paying _head money_ to soldiers and sailors for the numbers they kill, was abolished by us."
John Stuart Mill very rightly said "that our force ought to be as strong as possible for defence and as weak as might be for offence," only that it is so very difficult sometimes to tell which is which.
In the _Ethics of War_, Newman argues that "there is nothing more fundamental to civilized warfare than that no war shall be commenced without a previous statement of grievances, and demand of redress--a demand made to the Sovereign himself; and that _only after_ he has refused redress, and when in consequence war has been solemnly declared, with its motives and aim, shall hostilities be begun. In dealing with great Powers we anxiously observe these forms.... But it is our Asiatic wars which have brought out the formidable fact that the Cabinets claim to discard the authority of Parliament altogether.... There is no more fundamental principle of freedom ... than that no nation shall be dragged into a war by its executive, against its will and judgment.... Nay, if even a majority of every class in the nation desired war, yet they have no right to enter into it without first hearing what the minority has to say on the other side. This is the essential meaning of deliberative institutions."
Mr. Toulmin Smith, whose weighty words bring to bear on the subject the witness of an England of medieval days, says that in the fourteenth century it was a positive rule that "_consent_ of the Great Council, and afterwards _of the Parliament_, _was necessary_ to a war or to a treaty." In his _Parliamentary Remembrances_ he gives many precedents, both from the histories of England and Scotland, showing that no peace was made, no war was made, without Parliament being summoned. Henry V, he says, would not enter "matters of foreign embroilment" (war with France, for instance) without the consent of Parliament; and when the French king wished for peace, Henry replied that peace needed to "be allowed, accepted, and approved by the three Estates of each kingdom." The same process was gone through with regard to the French king and his Estates of France. Newman quotes Rome, whose citizens went through a long formality before making any war, the King and Senate "consulting the College of Heralds for erudite instructions as to minute ceremonies. For perhaps four centuries the discipline of the army was admirable; its decline began from the day when a general (Gen. Manlius) first took upon himself to make war at his own judgment, trusting to obtain a bill of indemnity."