Darien writes with that force which can, indeed, only come from the intimate persuasion that what it tells mankind is true, and should be told.
'"It is commonly said," he continues, "that the army incarnates the nation. History puts this into our heads by means of all her subtlest lies. Ten martial anecdotes sum up a century; a boast describes a reign. History preaches hatred of the people, respect for the pillager, the sanctification of carnage, the glorification of slaughter. The weak, the sensitive, the timid succumb beneath it, and are buried in the red clay or left on the sand for the vultures and jackal. The strong (sometimes, not always) lives to have his whole future poisoned by these memories, his whole temperament warped and embittered; or he forces his tormentors to shoot him by some unpardonable breach of discipline; some blow to a superior, or some intentionally insolent reply; death is the continually recurring sentence in the military code; if the man does not bend he must be broken: broken in two with a volley which smashes his spine. The punishment-battalions, the workshops of the Travaux Forcés, are the immediate consequences of the standing armies. Society, to protect its interests, makes of a young citizen a soldier, and of the soldier a galley slave at the first effort in him to shake off the yoke of that discipline which degrades and brutalises him, requiring like all tyrants and usurpers to support its rule by terror, to make itself dreaded that its prestige may dazzle and its tottering throne be secured. What society requires is an obedience passive and blind, a total imbecility, a humiliation which has no limit or hesitation; the response of the machine to the mechanic, of the dancing dog to the stick of his teacher. Take your man, make him surrender all free will, power of choice, liberty, and conscience, and you create and possess a soldier. To-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, there is as much difference between the two words, soldier and citizen, as there was in the time of Cæsar between two similar words--Milites and Quirites. The standing army is the corner-stone of the actual social structure; it is a force which sanctions and secures the conquests of force; it is a barrier raised much less to combat foreign invasion than to resist and paralyse the just claims of nations. Soldiers, those sons of the people armed against their fathers, are nothing more or less than gendarmes in disguise."'