Do you know the classic?

An excerpt from a book that was a marker of the beginning of realistic fiction as a genre.

When I had considered this a little, it followed necessarily that I was certainly in the wrong in it; that these people were not murderers in the sense that I had before condemned them in my thoughts; any more than those Christians were murderers who often put to death the prisoners taken in battle; or, more frequently, upon many occasions put whole troops of men to the sword, without giving quarter, though they threw down their arms and submitted.