Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/77

Rh the employment of force, even against the popular will. An army is an organization of men subject to the command of a superior will, the origin or the purpose of which it is assumed to have no right to question. The standing army is in this sense, therefore, according to its nature and spirit an essentially monarchical institution.

But France is a republic. She calls herself a democratic republic. A democratic republic is, or should be, government by public opinion as expressed in legal form—public opinion as it issues from discussion in which all the people are free to participate, and the outcome of which they are to determine by their freely given suffrages. The army, inasmuch as it is in all things subject to the will of superior authority without discussion or question, must therefore be regarded as an incongruous element in a democracy. The authority to which it is subject may indeed be a government created by public opinion and supported by it. But as such a government may happen to become faithless to its origin, or fall out of accord with the public opinion of the time, the army, as an organized force subject to its will, may be used by it for ends and purposes adverse to the interests or the will of the people.

It is for reasons like this that the true democratic spirit has always been jealously opposed to the maintenance of large standing armies. It has always insisted that the organizations of armed forces that may be necessary for the enforcement of the laws and the keeping of order at home, or for the defense of the integrity or the honor of the state in foreign warfare, should remain as much as possible identified with the people themselves—should be, in fact, of the people in their origin, their interests, their sympathies, as well as in the character and aspirations of those commanding them; and that, if a standing army as a permanent institution be indeed indispensable for certain necessary objects, it should,