THE LIMITS OF PACIFISM
The peace movement, like the temperance crusade, had its moderates and its extremists. The friends of peace were never unanimous in their attitude towards defensive war, and therefore the American Peace Society only haltingly advanced towards the position of condemning all wars, whether offensive or defensive. The period preceding this nailing of the flag to the topmast was marked by an active conflict of ideas. On the one hand this conflict helped to clarify the pacifist position, but on the other hand it led to a dissipation of energy and finally to a rupture within the peace movement.
As long as the movement was dominated by Noah Worcester and the Massachusetts Peace Society, the moderates, who admitted the Scriptural legality and justifiableness of defensive wars, more than held the field. Indeed, Joshua P. Blanchard later observed that he had the "misfortune to be alone among the respected founders of the cause in Boston" in his thoroughgoing stand of condemning all wars.1 His colleagues, in merely denouncing war in general terms, thus differed both from the London Peace Society and from Dodge, who from the first had taken the ground that all war was contrary to Christianity. Dodge claimed the half-heartedness of the Massachusetts Peace Society as an excuse for not working very vigorously with it. At Philadelphia, as we have seen, the Friend referred to the halfway convictions of many peace societies as a cause of Quaker indifference towards them.
It was perhaps the temperate personality of Worcester which kept him from committing himself squarely on the issue of defensive war. Though the Friend of Peace for the most part kept silent on this question, its editor in 1822 admitted into the pages of his periodical—and perhaps even wrote—a Socratic dia-
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