he country--this even in case there
were no wars or apprehension of wars. They supply an element needed in
all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit,
perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which
has in it always something low and sordid.

But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations
to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can
have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human
animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor,
and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for
war. A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have
prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand
well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President
on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion,
or have instantly suppressed it. The cost of maintaining a land army
of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would
have been, in simple money value, only a tithe of what the rebellion
has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have
been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on
the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual
losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand
millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the assessed value of the whole
property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860,
and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of
property since. To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require
a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without
discharging a cent of the principal, than would have been necessary to
maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the
prevention of the rebellion.

The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder
much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its
military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their
normal order; but a regular army--not militia or volunteers, who are
too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a
navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a
peace establishment. The army of a hundred thousand men must form a
cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to
place t