The US at War

With all the changes that have occurred in the last 165 years or so, it's amazing how many things have remained the same. Shouldn't those with power have learned by now?

"I wish," he [Theodore Parker] said, "All of this killing of 2,000 Americans on the field of battle, and the 10,000 Mexicans; all this slashing of the bodies of 24,000 wounded men; all the agony of the other 18,000, that have died of disease, could have taken place in some spot where the President of the United States and his Cabinet, where all the Congress who voted for the war. . . the controlling men of both political parties, who care nothing for the bloodshed and misery they have idly caused, could have stood and seen it all; and then that the voice of the whole nation had come up to them and said, 'This is your work, not ours. . . We have trusted you thus far, but please God we never will trust you again.'"

- Quoted from Gura, Philip F. American Transcendentalism: A History. Hill and Wang (New York 2007). p. 221-2, which quoted it from A Sermon of the Mexican War (1848) in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker. Ed by Frances Power Cobbe, 12 vols (London: Truber 1863-65), 7:59-60.