Chesterton Addresses Cowards…

…who champion notions like “let’s say that I lose my soul to save innocent lives. Then so be it.”

From the Illustrated London News, Sept. 16, 1916, in which Chesterton points out the dangers of abandoning Christian principles in warfare. Here are some highlights …

“… the real reason for refusing … to copy the Prussian malpractices is the same as the reason for refusing all peace or parley with the Prussian monarchy. The more we insist that the terms must be our terms, the more do we weaken ourselves if our methods are their methods.”

“If a European State, at war with other States, suddenly began to eat its prisoners, the other States would be justified in breaking off all intercourse and international discussion, and destroying it without further speech. But if the other States began, however reluctantly, to eat a prisoner here and there, they might still maintain much of their logical case, and even something of a rather relative moral superiority. But obviously there is one thing they could not possibly maintain, and that is the innocent and instantaneous disgust at the mere sight of a cannibal. Yet it would be precisely upon that innocent disgust that they would base their whole claim to crush a mere nest of cannibals. Even if they only on rare occasions took a bite at a man, even if they were only found cautiously and considerately nibbling at a man, they would be biting holes in their own case; they would be nibbling away the natural instincts which were their chief allies in the whole war. They would be making the crime of their ememy a less exceptional thing, and therefore the crushing of their enemy a more exceptional thing. If at the end of the war it seemed less horrible to eat a man, it would seem more horrible to shoot a man-eater.”

“Our chances of averting that peril [of a false peace with Prussia] do not depend on petty reprisals for his brutalities, or on playing the monkey to any of his monkey tricks. They depend on the contrast between the brute and monkey and the dignity of man which he has insulted. They depend upon keeping open the gulf that separates common good and eil from this sinister and even insane exception in the chronicles of Christian men. And if we do not do it, our danger is that we shall waste the wealth of our wrath in breaking tools and toys, and the evil itself will escape us.”