Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/95

Rh Let me now pass to the institutional aspect of the case as it concerns this Republic in particular. I am far from predicting that the organization and maintenance and use of large armaments will speedily bring forth in this country the same consequences which they did produce in England in Cromwell's time, and in France at the periods of the first and the second French republics. With us the “man on horseback” is not in sight. There is no danger of monarchical usurpation by a victorious general—although it is well worthy of remembrance that even here in the United States of America, at the close of the Revolutionary war, at the very threshold of our history as a republic, a large part of the Revolutionary army, “turned by six years of war from militia into seasoned veterans,” and full of that overbearing esprit de corps characteristic of standing armies, urged George Washington to make himself a dictator, a monarch; that, as one of his biographers expresses it, “it was as easy for Washington to have grasped supreme power then, as it would have been for Cæsar to have taken the crown from Antony upon the Lupercal”; and that it was only George Washington's patriotic loyalty and magnificent manhood that stamped out the plot. However, usurpation of so gross a character would now be rendered infinitely more difficult, not only by the republican spirit and habits of the people, but also by our federative organization dividing so large an expanse of country into a multitude of self-governing States.

But even in such a country and among such a people it is possible to demoralize the Constitutional system and to infuse a dangerous element of arbitrary power into the government without making it a monarchy in form and name. One of the most necessary conservative agencies in a democratic republic is general respect for constitutional principles, and faithful observance of