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Front Page  Quotations Other Quotes Week of 26 March, 2012
About this Quotation:
John Bright, along with his fellow Member of Parliament Richard Cobden, were two of the most outspoken advocates of free trade and peace in mid-19th century Britain. They combined moral, political, and economic arguments into a powerful liberal critique of war and the classes who agitated for war and led the troops into battle. In this quotation, which is taken from a speech Bright gave to a peace conference, he attempts to counter the government propaganda for war which incessantly depicted the Russian Empire as barbarous, unchristian, and threatening to the British people. But the public clamor for war was so strong neither he nor Cobden could stop the march to a disastrous war. Cobden even lost his seat because of his principled opposition to interventionism. Bright argued that war could be summarized in the following sentence: war is “the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable.” As a Quaker he urged the British people not to treat their religion as “a romance” which they could toss aside whenever a popular war approached. Instead he urged that they adopt “sound economic principles”, “a sense of justice,” and the Christian principle that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Other quotes from this week:Other quotes about War & Peace:- 2013: The 10th Day of Christmas: Richard Cobden on public opinion and peace on earth (c. 1865)
- 2013: The 8th Day of Christmas: Jefferson on the inevitability of revolution in England only after which there will be peace on earth (1817)
- 2012: The 7th Day of Christmas: Madison on “the most noble of all ambitions” which a government can have, of promoting peace on earth (1816)
- 2012: The 4th Day of Christmas: Dante Alighieri on human perfectibility and peace on earth (1559)
- 2012: The 3rd Day of Christmas: Erasmus stands against war and for peace on earth (16th century)
- 2012: The 2nd Day of Christmas: Petrarch on the mercenary wars in Italy and the need for peace on earth (1344)
- 2012: The 1st Day of Christmas: Jan Huss’ Christmas letters and his call for peace on earth (1412)
- 2012: The evangelist Luke “on earth peace, good will toward men” (1st century)
- 2012: Molinari on the elites who benefited from the State of War (1899)
- 2012: John Bright calls British foreign policy “a gigantic system of (welfare) for the aristocracy” (1858)
- 2012: James Madison on the necessity of separating the power of “the sword from the purse” (1793)
- 2012: Sumner’s vision of the American Republic was a parsimonious government which had little to do (1898)
- 2012: Sumner’s vision of the American Republic as a confederation of free and peaceful industrial commonwealths (1898)
- 2012: Cobden argues that the British Empire will inevitably suffer retribution for its violence and injustice (1853)
- 2011: Cobden on the complicity of the British people in supporting war (1852)
- 2011: The City of War and the City of Peace on Achilles’ new shield (900 BC)
- 2011: Cobden on the principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other countries (1859)
- 2011: Cobden urges the British Parliament not to be the “Don Quixotes of Europe” using military force to right the wrongs of the world (1854)
- 2011: James Mill likens the expence and economic stagnation brought about by war to a “pestilential wind” which ravages the country (1808)
- 2011: The Duke of Burgundy asks the Kings of France and England why “gentle peace” should not be allowed to return France to its former prosperity (1599)
- 2011: Grotius on Moderation in Despoiling the Country of one’s Enemies (1625)
- 2011: Sumner and the Conquest of the United States by Spain (1898)
- 2010: Trenchard on the dangers posed by a standing army (1698)
- 2010: John Jay on the pretended as well as the just causes of war (1787)
- 2010: Vicesimus Knox on how the aristocracy and the “spirit of despotism” use the commemoration of the war dead for their own aims (1795)
- 2010: Milton warns Parliament’s general Fairfax that justice must break free from violence if “endless war” is to be avoided (1648)
- 2009: Madison argued that war is the major way by which the executive office increases its power, patronage, and taxing power (1793)
- 2009: Thomas Jefferson on the Draft as "the last of all oppressions" (1777)
- 2009: Daniel Webster thunders that the introduction of conscription would be a violation of the constitution, an affront to individual liberty, and an act of unrivaled despotism (1814)
- 2008: Alexander Hamilton warns of the danger to civil society and liberty from a standing army since “the military state becomes elevated above the civil” (1787)
- 2008: John Trenchard identifies who will benefit from any new war “got up” in Italy: princes, courtiers, jobbers, and pensioners, but definitely not the ordinary taxpayer (1722)
- 2008: Adam Smith observes that the true costs of war remain hidden from the taxpayers because they are sheltered in the metropole far from the fighting and instead of increasing taxes the government pays for the war by increasing the national debt (1776)
- 2007: James Madison on the need for the people to declare war and for each generation, not future generations, to bear the costs of the wars they fight (1792)
- 2007: Thomas Gordon on standing armies as a power which is inconsistent with liberty (1722)
- 2007: James Madison argues that the constitution places war-making powers squarely with the legislative branch; for the president to have these powers is the “the true nurse of executive aggrandizement” (1793)
- 2007: St. Thomas Aquinas discusses the three conditions for a just war (1265-74)
- 2006: A.V. Dicey noted that a key change in public thinking during the 19thC was the move away from the early close association between “peace and retrenchment” in the size of the government (1905)
- 2006: J.M. Keynes reflected on that “happy age” of international commerce and freedom of travel that was destroyed by the cataclysm of the First World War (1920)
- 2006: John Jay in the Federalist Papers discussed why nations go to war and concluded that it was not for justice but “whenever they have a prospect of getting any thing by it” (1787)
- 2005: Thomas Gordon gives a long list of ridiculous and frivolous reasons why kings and tyrants have started wars which have led only to the enslavement and destruction of their own people (1737)
- 2005: Hugo Grotius states that in an unjust war any acts of hostility done in that war are “unjust in themselves” (1625)
- 2005: Hugo Grotius discusses the just causes of going to war, especially the idea that the capacity to wage war must be matched by the intent to do so (1625)
- 2005: Herbert Spencer argued that in a militant type of society the state would become more centralised and administrative, as compulsory education clearly showed (1882)
- 2005: William Graham Sumner denounced America’s war against Spain and thought that “war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery” would result in imperialsm (1898)
- 2005: Erasmus has the personification of Peace come down to earth to see with dismay how war ravages human societies (1521)
- 2004: Ludwig von Mises laments the passing of the Age of Limited Warfare and the coming of Mass Destruction in the Age of Statism and Conquest (1949)
- 2004: Thomas Hodgskin on the Suffering of those who had been Impressed or Conscripted into the despotism of the British Navy (1813)
- 2004: Robert Nisbet on the Shock the Founding Fathers would feel if they could see the current size of the Military Establishment and the National Government (1988)
- 2004: Adam Smith on the Sympathy one feels for those Vanquished in a battle rather than for the Victors (1762)
- 2004: Hugo Grotius on sparing Civilian Property from Destruction in Time of War (1625)
- 2004: Bernard Mandeville on how the Hardships and Fatigues of War bear most heavily on the “working slaving People” (1732)
26 March, 2012Read the full quote in context here. The British MP and peace advocate John Bright (1811-1889) gave a speech at the Conference of the Peace Society in Edinburgh in the summer of 1853 to oppose the forthcoming war against Russia (the Crimean War 1854-56). He reminded his listeners that many people who advocate war have never fought in one and that they forget that war inevitably brings with it the “concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable”:
What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable…
Well, if you go into war now you will have more banners to decorate your cathedrals and churches. Englishmen will fight now as well as they ever did, and there is ample power to back them, if the country can be but sufficiently excited and deluded. You may raise up great Generals. You may have another Wellington, and another Nelson too; for this country can grow men capable for every enterprise. Then there may be titles, and pensions, and marble monuments to eternize the men who have thus become great; but what becomes of you and your country, and your children? For there is more than this in store…
Precisely the same things will come again. Rely on it, that injustice of any kind, be it bad laws, or be it a bloody, unjust, and unnecessary war, of necessity creates perils to every institution in the country….I confess when I think of the tremendous perils into which unthinking men—men who do not intend to fight themselves—are willing to drag or to hurry this country, I am amazed how they can trifle with interests so vast, and consequences so much beyond their calculation.
The full passage from which this quotation was taken can be be viewed below (front page quote in bold):What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable. … There is another question which comes home to my mind with a gravity and seriousness which I can scarcely hope to communicate to you. You who lived during the period from 1815 to 1822 may remember that this country was probably never in a more uneasy position. The sufferings of the working classes were beyond description, and the difficulties, and struggles, and bankruptcies of the middle classes were such as few persons have a just idea of. There was scarcely a year in which there was not an incipient insurrection in some parts of the country, arising from the sufferings which the working classes endured. You know very well that the Government of the day employed spies to create plots, and to get ignorant men to combine to take unlawful oaths; and you know that in the town of Stirling, two men who, but for this diabolical agency, might have lived good and honest citizens, paid the penalty of their lives for their connection with unlawful combinations of this kind.
Well, if you go into war now you will have more banners to decorate your cathedrals and churches. Englishmen will fight now as well as they ever did, and there is ample power to back them, if the country can be but sufficiently excited and deluded. You may raise up great Generals. You may have another Wellington, and another Nelson too; for this country can grow men capable for every enterprise. Then there may be titles, and pensions, and marble monuments to eternize the men who have thus become great; but what becomes of you and your country, and your children? For there is more than this in store. That seven years to which I have referred was a period dangerous to the existence of Government in this country, for the whole substratum, the whole foundations of society were discontented, suffering intolerable evils, and hostile in the bitterest degree to the institutions and the Government of the country.
Precisely the same things will come again. Rely on it, that injustice of any kind, be it bad laws, or be it a bloody, unjust, and unnecessary war, of necessity creates perils to every institution in the country. If the Corn-law had continued, if it had been impossible, by peaceful agitation, to abolish it, the monarchy itself would not have survived the ruin and disaster that it must have wrought. And if you go into a war now, with a doubled population, with a vast commerce, with extended credit, and a wider diffusion of partial education among the people, let there ever come a time like the period between 1815 and 1822, when the whole basis of society is upheaving with a sense of intolerable suffering, I ask you, how many years’ purchase would you give even for the venerable and mild monarchy under which you have the happiness to live? I confess when I think of the tremendous perils into which unthinking men—men who do not intend to fight themselves—are willing to drag or to hurry this country, I am amazed how they can trifle with interests so vast, and consequences so much beyond their calculation.
[More works by John Bright (1811 – 1889) and on The Manchester School] |
