Look at things as a philosopher, and you will learn resignation, or rather thankful content, by perceiving that they all so hang together, that on the whole you cannot make them much better, nor can gain much more without losing much. We are carried back in our thoughts to the fable of Menenius Agrippa, though with a changed adaptation. The Nation is the sacred seat of vital heat and nourishment, the original element, and the first principle, and the number one of the State framework, and in its various members we find, not what is most effective or exquisite of its kind, but accessories compatible with the supremacy of that digestive and nutritive apparatus. Such men will not make it dance on its lame leg. They will not go to war, if they can help it, for the conduct of war is not among its chef-d' uvres , as I now, for positively the last time, will explain.
Material force is the ultima ratio of political society everywhere.
Continuity, establishment, organization, are necessary to the idea of a school and a craft. In other words, if war be an art, and not a matter of haphazard and pell-mell fighting, as under the walls of Troy, it requires what is appropriately called a standing army, that is, an army which has a status . Unless we are in a happy valley, or on a sea-protected island, we must have a standing army, or we are open to hostile attack. Thus it was that the Pretorians, the Gothic mercenaries, the medieval Turks, and later Janizzaries, became the masters and upsetters of the Emperors, Caliphs, and Sultans who employed them. This formidable difficulty has been fatal to the military profession in popular governments, who in alarm have thrown the national defence upon the Nation, aided, as it might happen, by foreign mercenaries paid by the job.