Urging Barbarian Warfare

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1, 7 January 1909, Page 22

Urging Barbarian Warfare

As our eyes travelled over the pages of .The World Today, we came across a curious plea for a return to the practice of the torture, wholesale slaughter of combatants and non-combatants, and the other barbarities of warfare which it took the Church so many centuries of strenuous endeavor to abolish. This plea for savagery in warfare forms the theme of an article (pp. 1136-8) by Arthur H. Dutton, lately a lieutenant in the United States Navy. Ex-Lieutenant Dutton comes of a fighting ancestry, he is a, veteran of two wars, and is described by the editor of The World To-day as 'an ardent advocate of the permanent establishment of universal peace and general disarmament of nations.' It is folly,' says the Ex-Lieutenant (p. 1137) for the nations to delude themselves into the notion ' that the way 'to promote peace is to minimise the' rigors of war. . . The more humane war is made, the more nations will indulge in it. The more barbarous it is made, the sooner will mankind awaken to its injustice and its absurdity, and banish it from the earth.' He urges, -in all seriousness, a conference 'of the nations to abolish the international war-laws which it took Christian sentiment such long ages to build up. He demands that war shall ' be henceforth waged with rules until it vanishes. Make it,' 'says he, 'a deadly struggle, too horrible to contemplate.' He suggests the following as the methods of the warfare of the future: — , '1. Take no prisoners. Put all the enemy to the sword. Torture and maim at will. . '2. fclay the old, the feeble, and the infants. Reduce the strong, both male and female, to slavery when desired for public or private labor. Separate the families. '3. Turn over captured cities, towns, and villages to the victorious soldiery, to pillage, ravish, and burn. '4. Devastate the fields, destroy, all machinery and improvements of every kind not needed by the victors for their own use. e's.e 's. Use explosive bullets; poison~the springs and wells after passing through the conquered country. ' 6. Torture to death, by -the most barbaric processes that can be devised, the public officials of the conquered country, particularly those responsible for .causing the war. 7. Enemy's ships captured to be looted and then sunk or burned with all hands. '8. Spare nothing in the conquered territory save what the vectors want and Such things as are of permanent value to art, science, and literature of the world in general. Take, these away.^ Leave the conquered country a wilderness, to be recultivated and rebuilt only by the slave labor of its humbled people for the benefit of their conquerors. In a word, obliterate the defeated nation. 1

' Make war humane, and we shall have it always with us. Make it horrible in its ferocity, and it will cease forever.' This is the parting shot which Warrior Dutton fires at war. Unfortunately for his\ , contention, war was never so common, and never approached so nearly to a permanent condition, as in the times when, and among the peoples, both -ancient and modern, where, it was most ruthless and savage. The Ex-Lieutenant is evidently a stout believer in the principle wrongly attributed to the Jesuits, but textually enunciated by the English nonCatholic poet and diplomatist, Matthew Prior, and, before him, in equivalent terms, by Dr. Martin Luther during his antagonism to the Catholic Church — namely, that 'the end must justify the means.' International peace is a good thing. Permanent international peace is still better. - But the law of God will not tolerate the attainment of (fven so desirable an end even by the perpetration of so much as, the smallest crime, much less by such wholesale ono'rmities as those suggested by Mr. Arthur H. Dutton. And the world would not willingly purchase even the peace of Nirvana by a return to the conditions of barbarism in warfare from which the Catholic Church and- Christian charity so toilfully raised our race.