George Santayana: His parents’ admonitions against war

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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

American writers on peace and against war

George Santayana: Selections on war

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George Santayana
Persons and Places

Letter from his mother.

No date (about 1880)

“I am glad that our son has no inclination to be a soldier. No career displeases me more, and if I were a man, it would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior. Barbarous customs that I hope will disappear when there are no kings and no desire for conquest and when man has the world for his country and all his fellow-beings for his brothers. You will say that I am dreaming. It may be so. Adieu.”

I suspect that the words may have come from her father’s lips, or out of the book of maxims drawn from all sages, from Confucius to Benjamin Franklin, that my grandfather had collected and published….

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…he (Santayana’s father) was no soldier, not merely no soldier temperamentally in that personally he shrank from conflicts rather than provoked them, but no soldier morally or religiously, in that he saw nothing worth fighting for. Of course, you fought for your life if attacked: that was a mechanical reaction of the organism. But he could have felt no sympathy with the martial regimen and the martial patriotism of an ancient city.