5. Pensions, Bonuses, and Militarism
One of the important political and economic questions which countries have to settle in modern times at the close of a war is that of reinstating soldiers in civil pursuits and of granting them some material compensation for their services. After the Civil War in this country the question was solved by throwing open lands in the Middle West to settlement and by appropriating money liberally for pensions. At the moment of writing the needs of the soldier returning to civil life from the late war with the Central European powers have been met in part by a system of insurance, by the payment of a small sum on discharge, and by making provision for the disabled. It has been further proposed to compensate men honorably discharged from service by giving them either cash payments or homestead allotments. All of these plans were tried by the Romans. Down to the close of the second century before our era only the well-to-do were enrolled in the legions. Marius for the first time opened the ranks to the proletariat. When the term of service of his soldiers came to an end he had to make suitable provision for them. He did so by founding a colony and granting them allotments in it. This precedent was followed by Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, and between 59 and 31 B.C. twenty-five or thirty colonies of veterans were thus established. Under the Empire a soldier received also a fixed sum of money on his discharge. The benefit societies which the Roman government encouraged among the soldiers served somewhat the same purpose as our system of war-insurance. The bonus system was adopted, in a formal way, for the first time by Augustus in 7 B.C., instead of the customary assignments of land. At that time he gave gratuities to his discharged soldiers amounting to 400,000,000 sesterces, as he tells us in his biography.[34] Although this is perhaps the earliest instance of the systematic award of a large cash payment, occasional grants of this sort occurred much earlier, because the bonus had its beginning in the division of the spoils of war among the soldiers, and was given at the time of the triumph. When the practice of granting a bonus had once been formally established, the occasions on which it was given were multiplied for political reasons. To win popularity with the army, Tiberius, on his accession, made a grant of money to every soldier, and his example was followed by Caligula, Claudius, Nero, and most of their successors. In the later empire, when the support of the army became all-important to an emperor, bonuses increased in size; they were given on many anniversaries, and imposed a very heavy burden on the imperial treasury. In the fourth century the Emperor Julian, who was far from warlike, on mounting the throne, gave to every Roman soldier a bonus whose nominal value was equal to about thirty-two dollars. Since there were probably 400,000 soldiers in the army, this action cost the government $12,800,000 or nearly $50,000,000 if we roughly estimate that gold and silver would purchase four times as much then as they do now. The militaristic spirit of Rome has descended to us and makes its influence felt today. The campaigns and the conquests of great Roman commanders have been studied with minute care by generals and statesmen in modern times. Elaborate studies, for instance, have been made of Caesar’s campaigns by Napoleon III, by Col. Stoffel of his staff, and in General von Göler’s great work dedicated to Marshall von Moltke with the noteworthy phrase: “Feldherr und Sieger auf gallischem Boden.” Elsewhere, in a paper on the trend of classical history, I noted the fact that the study of Roman military history had been engaging the attention of an unusually large number of scholars in the years immediately preceding the war with the states of Central Europe. It was also a significant thing that many of these writers in their appraisal of the men and the events of ancient times tacitly held to the principle that in the ultimate analysis the course of history was determined by the use of naked force, and that the progress of the world was furthered by the conquest of the small nation by the great one.