Yes, reader, my
fund will be inexhaustible, because the period of its growth will be
measured by the concurrent deposition of the Ceylon mustard-seed from
the everlasting pillar.
Yet why, or on what principle? It is because I see, or imagine that I
see, a twofold necessity for war--necessity in two different senses--
1st, a physical necessity arising out of man's nature when combined
with man's situation; a necessity under which war may be regarded, if
you please, as a nuisance, but as a nuisance inalienable from
circumstances essential to human frailty. 2dly, a moral necessity
connected with benefits of compensation, such as continually lurk in
evils acknowledged to be such--a necessity under which it becomes
lawful to say, that war _ought_ to exist as a balance to opposite
tendencies of a still more evil character. War is the mother of wrong
and spoliation: war is a scourge of God--granted; but, like other
scourges in the divine economy, war purifies and redeems itself in its
character of a counterforce to greater evils that could not otherwise
be intercepted or redressed. In two different meanings we say that a
thing is necessary; either in that case where it is inexorably forced
on by some sad overruling principle which it is vain to fight against,
though all good men mourn over its existence and view it as an
unconditional evil; or secondly, in that case, where an instrument of
sorrowful consequences to man is nevertheless invoked and postulated by
man's highest moral interests, is nevertheless clamorously indicated as
a blessing when looked at in relation to some antagonist cause of evil
for which it offers the one only remedy or principle of palliation.
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