ON THE FALSE ESTIMATE OF THE MILITARY CHARACTER. 243 



is purely physical, and how large a portion is related rather to the 

 animal than the intellectual part of our nature, we shall leave but 

 little scope for the claims of genius. This seems to have been the 

 opinion of a consummate master of war, and one not likely to depre- 

 ciate the art to which he owed his all, his fame, his fortune, and even 

 his fall : " Le genie," said Buonaparte, " est le beau idtal de la 

 guerre, la force en est le vrai." 



Those, on the other hand, who like Pope in his well-known lines 

 on " Macedonia's madmen," &c., regard warriors as mere unre- 

 flecting brutes, *' ne'er looking forward further than their noses," or, 

 Irishmen in a row, mere givers and receivers of hard knocks, have, 

 though styling themselves philosophers, reasoned most unphiloso- 

 phically. Finding in all wars much of evil inflicted and received ; 

 wrong often triumphant ; right often prostrate ; that where right is 

 triumphant, it is so through an amount of evil which makes it ques- 

 tionable whether tolerance of the wrong would not have been better 

 than its redress by the means employed; these dark views of war 

 and its results are reflected on the warrior, whom they regard as a 

 senseless demon, a mere impersonification of brute force. This 

 opinion, however dignified by the name of philanthropy or philoso- 

 phy, is, like all views of one side only of a picture, erroneous. If 

 war is blackened by the ferocity of its Attilas and its Genserics, it 

 can likewise boast of its *' patriot Tell, its Bruce of Bannockburn" 

 Even the estimate between the evil inflicted and that averted by a 

 just war, is inferior to the warrior armed in a righteous cause, if it 

 be formed solely from a survey of the circumstances of the immediate 

 conflict. The influence of a noble and successful resistance to tyranny 

 and oppression is not limited to the result of the present warfare, or 

 history is indeed a dead letter. Did the Waldenses, did the Dutch 

 in the war of the Duke of Alva, did the Covenanters bleed in vain ? 

 Did not rather a holy incense arise from the blood of these martyrs 

 which has sanctified the cause of civil and religious liberty, has made 

 tyrants fearful openly to assail it, and armed the virtuous of subse- 

 quent ages in its defence ? Has not the truth of the beautiful line of 

 Southey, 



" Those who bravely suffer save mankind," 



been forcibly exemplified by their courageous resistance to oppres- 

 sion ? 



From the multifarious interests, commercial and political, by which 

 nations are now intertwined, the differences arising among them are 

 rarely distinguished by broad characters of right and wrong : to use 

 the expression of a celebrated legal personage respecting cases in 

 courts of justice, they are not black and white, but gray. In the 

 settlement, however, of these mixed cases by the " lex ultima re- 

 gum," other qualities than mere brute force are brought into action, 

 as any one may be convinced who will afford himself the gratifica- 

 tion of reading Colonel Napier's admirable history of the Penin- 

 sular war. He will there learn that prudence; the adaptation of 

 means to ends ; knowledge, geographical, moral, and statistical, of the 

 country in which he is engaged ; wisdom in council, and skill and 



