New York, December 14,1861.
As to that proposition to melt together the United States
army and the volunteers, I wish to heaven I had the ear of some influential man
in this matter. Nothing is more dangerous to modern civil liberty than a large
democratic army; vide France. The traditional fear of standing armies,
thoroughly founded in times past, when Louis XIV. and James II. were justly
haunting the minds of upright men, must be changed into a fear of a large,
thoroughly democratic army. In countries pervaded by an institutional spirit
and system of self-government, — with a true, not nominal, representative
national body, which keeps the army under its thumb as to size and
appropriation, — the danger is not in the standing army, of itself. Look at
England. Make our present large army a homogeneous, vast, democratic army; give
it some suecesses; let some striking victory knit them well together, man to
man, and to the general, — and every person versed in the analytical chemistry
of history will tell you that a Bonaparte dictating after a Lodi is
unavoidable. No congress, no parliament, can keep under an organized, vast,
democratic army, especially when no sea intervenes. There is nothing so
revolutionary as such an army. The sword is always arrogant. A soldier is
writing this, — but a soldier who is a historian too, and a citizen,
philosopher, and a man who is willing that this should be “hung out” after he
is gone — as they used to hang out the proof-sheets in the early days of
printing — for all that might choose to find errata. I stake my name to this. .
. .
SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and
Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 321
No comments:
Post a Comment