Only time, prolonged effort, national economics, universal progress and the pressure of public opinion could ever hope to grapple with the existence of war, the monster evil of the ages.
I have studied the massing of forces and scanned from point to point the old battle-grounds of Marengo and Jena and Waterloo and the Magenta and Solferino and it has seemed to me that these armies had a fairer field and a better chance than ours, in the Civil War. CLARA BARTON.
War may be a _great harmonizer_, but it is not a _humanizer_.
That which is won by the sword must be held by the sword, whether it is worth the cost or not. CLARA BARTON.
If there be any power on earth which can right the wrongs for which a nation goes to war, I pray it may be made manifest.
If there be any good wars, I will attend them.
That noble and numerous class of patriots who are brave with other men’s lives and lavish of other men’s money. GLADSTONE.
There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.
Don’t talk about war; we have done with war. The Peace of the world is the question now. CLARA BARTON.
Clara Barton was a patriot, but “not a war woman.” She had no sympathy with the religion such as was Odin’s, of the ninth century, which religion assured for him who had killed in battle the greatest number the highest seat reserved in the Paradise of the Valhalla; nor with the sentiment of the King of Denmark of that day, “What is more beautiful than to see the heroes pushing on through battle, though fainting with their wounds;” nor with the sentiment of that same king’s boast, “War was my delight from my youth, and from my childhood I was pleased with a bloody spear.”
Princes were privileged to kill, The numbers sanctified the crime.
Wolves in “packs” seek prey; so do men—in sheep’s clothing. Wolves truthful, in howls, send forth their propaganda—hunger; men untruthful, in words, send forth their propaganda—hate. If the “survival of the fittest” be nature’s law only brutes conform to nature—by using no weapons. Men kill their own “kith and kin”; brutes combine to protect their own species. The more one sees of men on war’s slaughter-fields killing their friends or strangers, for prospective profit, the more he must admire the ethics of the brute. In brute history there have been no wars. Facing human record, the record of 3,400 years, there have been 3,166 years of war, and only 234 years of peace; facing the picture of which history makes no mention and which in the wake of armies she had seen, Clara Barton says: “Faces bathed in tears and hands in blood, lees in the wind and dregs in the cup of military glory, war has cost a million times more than the world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created.”