Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The invasion that New York City should most fear, that of Vice and Crime and Degeneracy, has been accomplished. They have captured the outer fortifications and are intrenched within the citadel. The Goths are not at the gates,—they are within the gates.

Uncle Sam has transformed the wild Apaches of the Southwest into steady and industrious laborers who have done yeoman work with the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service in Arizona. New York is now breeding, in her modern canyons and cliff dwellings, a more bloodthirsty, cruel, and treacherous race of Apaches than were ever bred amid the mountain fastnesses and forbidding deserts of the Southwest.

Do not these domestic enemies constitute a more immediate danger than any foreign enemy?

The foreign enemy, with whose invasion the Militarists so delight to harrow our imaginations, is still in the remote distance—a future possibility, not even a probability on the Atlantic seacoast.

The greatest merit of the plan for national defense advocated in this book is that it will safeguard against danger from these domestic enemies, who are already in our midst, at the same time that it will safeguard, in the only adequate way yet proposed, against war or any possibility of a foreign invasion.

Many see the danger of a social or political cataclysm resulting from the saturnalia of degeneracy, disease, and crime that is being bred by tenement life and congested cities. Unfortunately they see no remedy for it but a stronger central government and a bigger standing army.

This desire for a standing army to protect against internal social or industrial disturbance leads to enthusiastic advocacy, on any pretext whatever, for a bigger army and navy whenever opportunity is presented. If the truth were known, the majority of those who so vigorously advocate a bigger and still bigger army and navy, are prompted by fear of an enemy in our midst, arising from human degeneracy in cities or from social or labor conflicts, more than by any danger of conflict with another nation.

The men who have built our great congested cities have undermined the pillars of the temple of our national strength and safety. Now they want protection from the consequences of their own work, which they so justly fear. They want this nation to adopt the Roman System, which finally worked Rome's destruction. They want soldiers hired to protect them because they fear the consequences of the things they have done, just to make money, and they cannot protect themselves from the dangers their own greed for wealth, at any cost to humanity, has created.

The inevitable result of the establishment of such a system of national defense as they advocate would be a military oligarchy. Combined with our present money oligarchy, it would be politically invincible. In some great internal crisis or social and political disturbance, all power would be centralized and our government would be transformed into a military autocracy. From that time on we would follow in the footsteps of Rome to our certain doom as a people and a nation.

It is a curious fact that this desire for protection from internal disturbance by a hired standing army comes from the very class in the United States which was, at the last, in Rome, ground between the upper and the nether millstones—between the army above and the proletariat below—in the final working out of the Roman System. The proscriptions of the Roman Emperors, to propitiate their armies, are forgotten by the modern patricians who clamor for a large standing army.