The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better for it) not
merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden guineas, which
would be something; but in what is better and more substantial than
either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the soil, and the work
of his hands—in the difference between what the industry of man, left to
itself, produces in time of peace for the benefit of man, and what the
same industry, under the direction of government, produces in time of
war for the destruction of others, without any benefit to himself, real,
imaginary, or pretended; we mean in a physical and economical point of
view, which is here the question—a question, which seems to last when
the religion, politics, and morality of the affair are over. We have
said that the expenses of the war might as well have been sunk in the
sea; and so they might, for they have been sunk in unproductive labour,
that is, in maintaining large establishments, and employing great
numbers of men in doing nothing or mischief; for example, in making
ships to destroy other ships, guns and gunpowder to blow out men’s
brains, pikes and swords to run them through the body, drums and fifes
to drown the noise of cannon and the whizzing of bullets; in making caps
and coats to deck the bodies of those who live by killing others; in
buying up pork and beef, butter and cheese, to enable them to do this
with more effect: in barracks, in transport-ships, in baggage and
baggage-waggons, in horses, bridles and saddles, in suttlers and
followers of the camp, in chaplains of the regiment, in common trulls,
and the mistresses of generals and commanders in chief; in contractors,
in army and navy agents, their partners, clerks, relations, dependants,
wives, families, servants in and out of livery, their town and country
houses, coaches, curricles, parks, gardens, grottos, hot-houses,
green-houses, pictures, statues, libraries; in treasury scribes, in
secretaries and under-secretaries of state, of the foreign, colonial,
and war departments, with their swarms of underlings, all of whom are
maintained out of the labour and sweat of the country, and for all of
whom, and for all that they do (put together) the country is not one pin
the better, or at least, one penny more in pocket, than if they were at
the bottom of the Channel. The present may have been the most just and
necessary war, in a political, moral, and religious point of view, that
ever was engaged in; but it has also been the most expensive; and what
is worse, the expense remains just the same, though it may have been the
most unjust and unnecessary in the world. We have paid for it, and we
must pay for it equally in either case, and wholly out of our own
pockets. The price of restoring the Pope, the Inquisition, the Bourbons,
and the doctrine of Divine Right, is half of our nine hundred millions
of debt. That is the amount of the government bill of costs, presented
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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