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.
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.