The Uses and Morality of War and Peace [pp. 75-77]

THE USES AND MORALITY OF WAR AND PEACE.
But we must stop. The conclusion of the whole matter is this:
We call upon the people of the South to be manly, enterprising,
hopeful. Their fortitude in adversity is even more admirable than
their gallantry in the field. They are capable of great things, and
may achieve a high destiny. Let them turn away from the dead
past, and look at the living future. "Men are sometimes masters of
their fates;" and the critical period has arrived in which they are
summoned to enter upon a new career of unexampled prosperity,
happiness, and virtue. Adversity is a stern school, but it is the
gymnasium of great souls; and the awful calamities which have
befallen the South may prove in the end to have been only the discipline of Providence to purify and consolidate its character, and to
make it, as hitherto the ornament, so now and hereafter, the support of a great nation.
ART. XII.-THE USES AND MIORALITY OF WAR AND PEACE.
THE article which follows is from the pen of one of our oldest contributors;
and although we have often differed from him, the originality of his views has
been universally admitted, and his power as a writer has never been questioned.
Whilst giving full weight -to what are recognized as the" horrors of war," and
of which the people of many of our States have had a fearful example recently
before them, we are not unwilling to admit, with Mr. Fitzhugh, that it has its
compensations, even as Shakespeare has expressed it:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad-ugly and venomous Hath yet a precious jewel in his head."-EDIToR.
ALMOST all men are prone to believe that wars are unmitigated
evils, and many look forward with hope and expectation to a milennial
state of society, in which there shall be no wars, no strife, no discord, no jealousies, no rivalries, and wherein all men shall love, aid,
and assist each other. If the absence of national and foreign wars
could beget intestine peace; could banish rivalries, competitions and
hatreds among neighbors, could beget universal love and concord,
then eternal peace would be the sumnnuim bonumn of human existence. But such milennial beatitude is a utopian'chimera which man
is doomed ever to pursue, and never to overtake.
National peace begets intestine war —makes men love money,
greedy of gain, selfish, low-minded, effeminate, and sensual. The
universal pursuit of wealth begets fierce and angry competitions, and
sets each man at war with his neighbor-for no man ever did acquire wealth, or ever expected to acquire it, by the labor of his own
hands. No man in pursuit of wealth expects, or is willing to exchange the results of his own labor for an equal amount of the
results of other people's labor. All men, in times of peace, try to
acquire wealth by the profits of capital, which does not labor at all,
which is a non-producer, which taxes or exploitates labor, but does
not pay or compensate it; or are trying to grow rich by professional
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