The synonyms of the standing army are selfishness and its vile issue, feudalism, serfdom, slavery, ignorance, and contempt of man. These conditions are passing away, and the standing army, the worst, as it is the most costly relic of savagery, must pass away with them. It cannot withstand the advance of the new education, whose mission is peace, whose quest is the truth, whose premise is a fact, whose conclusion is a thing of use and beauty, and whose goal is justice.
[E25] War is not merely a relic of barbarism; it is barbarism triumphant. It is evidence of the presence, active and malignant, of all the bad passions of man. Nor are idle armies less infamous than armies in deadly conflict. Carlyle well says that the one monster in the world is the idle man; and the standing army is a vast horde of idle men quartered on the community. The standing armies of Europe, on parade, in barracks, and in forts, are as unmixed an evil as the legions of Rome were in Gaul, in Greece, or before Carthage. It is a shame to civilization that arbitration did not long ago take the place of the coarse brutality of war. The duello between Nations is not less absurd, and it is a thousand-fold more wicked, than the duello between individuals. It is savagery pure and simple, the child of selfishness, and not less inconsistent with a high state of civilization than slavery.
[E26] Of the British funding system when it was in its infancy, as early as 1748, Lord Bolingbroke said: “It is a method by which one part of the nation is pawned to the other, with hardly any hope left of ever being redeemed.”
See, also, in the North American Review for September, 1886, an exhaustive article on the impolicy of national debt perpetuation, by N. P. Hill, in which it is alleged that “great interests are at work to prevent the payment of the national debt of the United States.”
[E27] In his recent great work—“The Wonderful Century”—Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, on the authority of “The Statesman’s Year Book” for 1897, states that the standing armies and navies of Europe number three millions of men; cost 180,000,000 pounds sterling per annum, and withdraw from useful employments ten millions of men engaged in repairing the waste of war.—“The Wonderful Century,” pp. 335-336. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1898.
[E28] “I know now that my fellowship with others cannot be shut off by a frontier, or by a government decree which decides that I belong to some particular political organization. I know now that all men are everywhere brothers and equals. When I think now of all the evil I have done, that I have endured, and that I have seen about me, arising from national enmities, I see clearly that it is all due to that gross imposture called patriotism—love for one’s native land.” ... “I understand now that true welfare is possible for me only on condition that I recognize my fellowship with the whole world.”—“My Religion,” p. 256. By Count Leo Tolstoi. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
[E29] There is another cause of the decline of Germany: War degrades; it is a reversion toward barbarism. Not only is the soldier brutalized by martial exercises and scenes of carnage, but the moral and mental fibre of the people of a nation which indulges in war is rendered coarser. The remark of M. Renan on the subject is profoundly philosophical:
“The man who has passed years in the carriage of arms after the German fashion is dead to all delicate work whether of the hand or brain.”—“Recollections of my Youth,” p. 159. By Ernest Renan. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883.