ike this can be true. It is obviously but a small part, after
all, of an extended community that can be ever actively and personally
engaged in these deeds of violence and blood. Man is not naturally a
ferocious wild beast. On the contrary, he loves, ordinarily, to live in
peace and quietness, to till his lands and tend his flocks, and to enjoy
the blessings of peace and repose. It is comparatively but a small
number in any age of the world, and in any nation, whose passions of
ambition, hatred, or revenge become so strong as that they love
bloodshed and war. But these few, when they once get weapons into their
hands, trample recklessly and mercilessly upon the rest. One ferocious
human tiger, with a spear or a bayonet to brandish, will tyrannize as he
pleases over a hundred quiet men, who are armed only with shepherds'
crooks, and whose only desire is to live in peace with their wives and
their children.

[Sidenote: Husbandmen.]
[Sidenote: How the Roman edifices were built.]
[Sidenote: Standing armies.]

Thus, while Marius and Sylla, with some hundred thousand armed and
reckless followers, were carrying terror and dismay wherever they went,
there were many millions of herdsmen and husbandmen in the Roman world
who were dwelling in all the peace and quietness they could command,
improving with their peaceful industry every acre where corn would ripen
or grass grow. It was by taxing and plundering the proceeds of this
industry that the generals and soldiers, the consuls and praetors, and
proconsuls and propraetors, filled their treasuries, and fed their
troops, and paid the artisans for fabricating their arms. With these
avails they built the magnificent edifices of Rome, and adorned its
environs with sumptuous villas. As they had the power and the arms in
their hands, the peaceful and the industrious had no alternative but to
submit. They went on as well as they could with their labors, bearing
patiently every interruption, returning again to till their fields after
the desolating march of the army had passed away, and repairing the
injuries of violence, and the losses sustained by plunder, without
useless repining. They looked upon an armed government as a necessary
and inevitable affliction of humanity, and submitted to its destructive
violence as they would submit to an earthquake or a pestilence. The
tillers of the soil manage better in this country at the present day.
They have the power in their own hands, and t