Republics and Standing Armies

“The Founders of the American Republic all knew the sad story of the Roman Republic. What the Founders had learned were lessons that illustrate the importance of a virtuous armed populace as an essential check on the inevitable depredations of a central government and its standing army.

Caesar’s use of the standing army to subdue Rome was used by the Antifederalists to show that an army drawn from the best, most faithful and most honorable parts of society could still be used to enslave their country.  And even Americans who felt at least a small standing army to be necessary were aware of the dangers. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 41, “the liberties of Rome proved the final victim to her military triumphs.”

The Founders greatly feared the corruption of the citizenry fostered by Rome’s ever-expanding government.  The Roman free-bread program produced a vast body of citizens too lazy to work.  Similarly, modern American police chiefs who warn citizens not to use force to protect themselves from force “have created a population of millions of people without the courage or character to protect themselves or their families from deadly assault.”

[When] Rome moved away from [its] militia system toward a mercenary standing army, the character of the citizenry began to decay. As Edward Gibbon, in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, explains:

“In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”

As the Roman standing army secured a vast empire against barbarian incursions, the people of the empire lost their capacity for self-government. “They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for the defense a mercenary army,” Gibbon explained. The once-great Romans became, morally speaking, “a race of pigmies,” and an easy target for the German tribes whose conquest of decrepit Rome finally “restored the manly spirit of freedom.”

(The Founders’ Reading of Ancient History, David B. Kopel, Chronicles, February 2000, excerpts pp. 47-48) (www.chroniclesmagazine.org)