t literature like a man,--a rare thing in his time,--said that
those instances refuted the doctrine which they were meant to prove. He
disposed of much idle declamation about the Lacedaemonians by
saying, most concisely, correctly and happily, that the Lacedaemonian
commonwealth really was a standing army which threatened all the rest
of Greece. In fact, the Spartan had no calling except war. Of arts,
sciences and letters he was ignorant. The labour of the spade and of the
loom, and the petty gains of trade, he contemptuously abandoned to men
of a lower caste. His whole existence from childhood to old age was
one long military training. Meanwhile the Athenian, the Corinthian, the
Argive, the Theban, gave his chief attention to his oliveyard or his
vineyard, his warehouse or his workshop, and took up his shield and
spear only for short terms and at long intervals. The difference
therefore between a Lacedaemonian phalanx and any other phalanx was long
as great as the difference between a regiment of the French household
troops and a regiment of the London trainbands. Lacedaemon consequently
continued to be dominant in Greece till other states began to employ
regular troops. Then her supremacy was at an end. She was great while
she was a standing army among militias. She fell when she had to contend
with other standing armies. The lesson which is really to be learned
from her ascendency and from her decline is this, that the occasional
soldier is no match for the professional soldier. [2]

The same lesson Somers drew from the history of Rome; and every scholar
who really understands that history will admit that he was in the right.
The finest militia that ever existed was probably that of Italy in the
third century before Christ. It might have been thought that seven
or eight hundred thousand fighting men, who assuredly wanted neither
natural courage nor public spirit, would have been able to protect their
own hearths and altars against an invader. An invader came, bringing
with him an army small and exhausted by a march over the snows of the
Alps, but familiar with battles and sieges. At the head of this army
he traversed the peninsula to and fro, gained a succession of victories
against immense numerical odds, slaughtered the hardy youth of Latium
like sheep, by tens of thousands, encamped under the walls of Rome,
continued during sixteen years to maintain himself in a hostile country,
and was never dislodged till he had