But suppose the story true, still
it may happen that a better valuation of it may disturb the whole
edifice of logical inferences by which it seemed to favor the
speculations of the war abolitionists. Let us see. What _was_ the
logic through which such a tale as this could lend any countenance to
the schemes of these abolitionists? That logic travelled in the
following channel. Such a tale, or the English tale of the gloves,
being supposed true, it would seem to follow, that war and the purposes
of war were phenomena of chance growth, not attached to any instinct so
ancient, and apparently so grooved into the dark necessities of our
nature, as we had all taken for granted. Usually, we rank war with
hunger, with cold, with sorrow, with death, afflictions of our human
state that spring up as inevitably without separate culture and in
defiance of all hostile culture, as verdure, as weeds, and as flowers
that overspread in spring time a fertile soil without needing to be
sown or watered--awful is the necessity, as it seems, of all such
afflictions. Yet, again, if (as these anecdote simply) war could by
possibility depend frequently on accidents of personal temperament,
irritability in a sensual king, wounded sensibilities of pride between
two sensitive ladies, there in a moment shone forth a light of hope
upon the crusade against war.
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