Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/636

624 To these parties of interest nations owe the exclamations against a militia, and the commendations of standing armies. The conquest of the Roman empire; the emancipations of Holland and the United States; the resistance of France against a combination of nearly all Europe, aided by her deserted standing army; the resistance of Spain, defrauded of her standing army, against France; and the consequences of a single defeat to countries confiding in standing armies, can never plead successfully for a militia, where the system of rearing separate interests prevails; because a militia cannot exist where its natural ally (the general interest) has been massacred up by civil law, into a herd of parties of interest, actuated by that species of guile and venality by which free governments are destroyed. If men could be made wise as well as knavish, by self interest, the majority would see the same principle in the doctrines of saving nations against themselves, of defending them by standing armies, and of governing them by a knot of parties of interest, intertwined like a knot of serpents for self gratification. A standing army being itself a legislative party of interest, becomes naturally the associate and ally of a policy compounded of such parties. If a militia cannot defend a country, the inhabitants cannot long exercise the right of self government. If it cannot repel invasion, it cannot prevent the usurpation of an army which can. A government at the head of an army able to control the people, will never regard election but as another instrument to rivet oppression.

The events of the revolutionary war are misrepresented by the combination of parties of interest (at the head of which, it is to be remembered, that the existing government by which they are created or sustained, is always stationed) as sufficient to explode a reliance upon a militia. During that war they performed many gallant actions, often gained victories unconnected with regulars, and submitted at least to equal hardships, without bounties, without clothing, without half pay, without donations of land, and