The patrician class in this country, who are now in their hearts praying for a strong centralized military government,—patiently and persistently planning for it, and making steady progress, too,—are the very class whose estates were confiscated, and their owners proscribed and executed by thousands to enable the Roman Emperors to appropriate their wealth and from that source satisfy the demands of the Army. The Army had to be rewarded for their services in conferring the purple on the Emperor, which they did by virtue of their military control of the government. It was the Army who made and unmade Emperors. The Emperors bought the Army with money and bribed the populace with feasts and games. The money to do both was obtained by the proscription and plunder of the wealthy patricians, the same class which in our time is now trying so hard to establish a gilded caste in New York and other great centers of wealth and a strong military government for this nation.
Whatever system of national defense is to be adopted in the United States, it must be a system in which the people themselves, as citizens and not as professional soldiers, furnish the human material for national defense. The people must control our army of citizen soldiery so absolutely that it can never be turned against their personal liberties or property rights. Let us heed the warning of Rome. It is none too soon. Let us beware of either confiscation or proscription as an evolution from a military government to a military despotism.
Switzerland alone, of all the civilized nations, and the smallest of them all, stands to-day a living demonstration of the National Spirit and the National System of Universal Service to their Country that should be adopted by all the nations of the world, to the fullest extent that it can be made applicable to their conditions. The Swiss System provides adequate national defense by the entire citizenship of the nation. Any subversion of the people's liberties through the power of the Army is impossible because the people themselves constitute the Army.
Australia has already adopted the Swiss System, substantially, and in consequence will escape the danger of military domination which will fasten itself on this country if our system of national defense is to consist only of a steadily increasing standing army. If we are to escape that danger we must never lose sight of the chief merit of the Swiss System, which is that every citizen participates in it and is affected by it, and we must as nearly as possible adapt it to the conditions existing in this country. There are many lessons that we might learn from the Swiss to our great national advantage.
If the Spirit of Switzerland, the self-reliant independence of her people, and their physical and mental vigor, individually and collectively, her national motto "All for each and each for all," dominated a nation of 100,000,000 people, like the United States, with an area of 2,973,890 square miles, exclusive of Alaska, as it does a nation of something less than 4,000,000 people, with an area of only 15,976 square miles, that Spirit and that System of national defense would soon become the universal system of the world.
The most dangerous military system for any nation, large or small, is a standing army large enough to invite attack, but not strong enough to repel it. That was the system of Belgium, and to that fact is due the destruction of Belgium. It is the present system of the United States. The most striking feature of our unpreparedness for war is the fact that it would be hopelessly impossible to defend ourselves against invasion without an army so huge as to dwarf our present army into insignificance.
The Swiss System is the best for Switzerland and is no doubt the best for Australia, but when adapting it, so far as may be practicable, to the conditions existing in the United States, we must not fall into the error of assuming that numerical strength is the only thing necessary in calculating the strength of an army. Soldiers alone are not all that a nation needs for defense, no matter how well they may be trained and equipped, or drilled and officered, or supplemented by naval strength or fortifications. The foundations on which national defense must be built are social, economic, and human. The question involves every element of the problem of preserving and perpetuating even-handed justice to all, social stability, economic strength and independence, a patriotic citizenship, and a rugged, stalwart, and virile race.
The population of Switzerland is less than that of the city of London, but if London were a nation by itself, with its congested population, human degeneration, artificial life, moral decay, and economic dependence, it would be impossible of defense from a military point of view.
Just exactly in the proportion that the United States gathers its population into great cities, does it court the same elements of weakness, but with this practical difference. London, being a part of the British Empire, is safeguarded by the whole civil and military power of that nation. Our great seaboard cities, being a part of the United States, are practically defenseless, because our people have no system or policy of national defense. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in the event of an attack by the invading military forces of any of the Great Powers, would be surrendered just as Brussels and Antwerp were surrendered, to save them from destruction, if for no other reason.