, and blacklegs, and
gamblers, having formed themselves into political clubs, were courted by
men high in authority, and rewarded for their dirty and corrupting
partisan services by offices of trust and responsibility: now, no man
clothed with authority would dare to insult the moral sense of community
by receiving such characters in the national councils, or by bestowing
public offices upon these corrupt and loathsome dregs of society.

Such, the advocates of non resistance would persuade us, are the
legitimate results in this country of war on the one hand and of a
long-protracted peace on the other. But there are men of less vivid
imaginations, and, perhaps, of visions less distorted by fanatical zeal,
who fail to perceive these results, and who even think they see the
reverse of all this. These men cannot perceive any thing in the lives of
Washington, Hamilton, and Knox, to show that they were the less virtuous
because they had borne arms in their country's service: they even fail
to perceive the injurious effects of the cultivation of a military
spirit on the military students of West Point, whose graduates, they
think, will compare favorably in moral character with the graduates of
Yale and Cambridge. Nay, more, some even go so far as to say that our
army, as a body, is no less moral than the corresponding classes in
civil life; that our common soldiers are as seldom guilty of riots,
thefts, robberies, and murders, as similarly educated men engaged in
other pursuits; that our military officers are not inferior in moral
character to our civil officers, and that, as a class, they will compare
favorably with any other class of professional men--with lawyers, for
example. In justification of these opinions--which may, perhaps, be
deemed singularly erroneous--they say, that in the many millions of
public money expended during the last forty years, by military officers,
for the army, for military defences, and for internal improvements, but
a single graduate of West Point has proved a defaulter, even to the
smallest sum, and that it is exceedingly rare to see an officer of the
army brought into court for violating the laws.

But even suppose it true that armies necessarily diffuse immorality
through community, is it not equally true that habitual submission to
the injustice, plunder, and insult of foreign conquerors would tend
still more to degrade and demoralize any people?

With regard to "pecuniary expenditures" re