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." Much has been said to show that war begets immorality, and that the cultivation of the military spirit has a corrupting influence on community.

And members of the clergy and of the bar have not unfrequently so far forgotten, if not truth and fact, at least the common courtesies and charities of life, as to attribute to the military profession an unequal share of immorality and crime.

We are declared not only parasites on the body politic, but professed violators of God's laws--men so degraded, though unconsciously, that "in the pursuit of justice we renounce the human character and assume that of the beasts;" it is said that "murder, robbery, rape, arson, theft, if only plaited with the soldier's garb, go unwhipped of justice."[1] It has never been the habit of the military to retort these charges upon the other professions.

We prefer to leave them unanswered.