citizens and soldiers might come to be distinguished as much as women and
men; that the citizen would become possessed of a property which he would
not be able, or required, to defend; that the soldier would be appointed to
keep for another what he would be taught to desire, and what he alone would
be enabled to seize and to keep for himself; that, in short, one set of men
were to have an interest in the preservation of civil establishments,
without the power to defend them; that the other were to have this power,
without either the inclination or the interest.

This people, however, by degrees came to put their military force on the
very footing to which this description alludes. Marius made a capital
change in the manner of levying soldiers at Rome: he filled his legions
with the mean and the indigent, who depended on military pay for
subsistence; he created a force which rested on mere discipline alone, and
the skill of the gladiator; he taught his troops to employ their swords
against the constitution of their country, and set the example of a
practice which was soon adopted and improved by his successors.

The Romans only meant by their armies to encroach on the freedom of other
nations, while they preserved their own. They forgot, that in assembling
soldiers of fortune, and in suffering any leader to be master of a
disciplined army, they actually resigned their political rights, and
suffered a master to arise for the state. This people, in short, whose
ruling passion was depredation and conquest, perished by the recoil of an
engine which they themselves had erected against mankind.

The boasted refinements, then, of the polished age, are not divested of
danger. They open a door, perhaps, to disaster, as wide and accessible as
any of those they have shut. If they build walls and ramparts, they
enervate the minds of those who are placed to defend them; if they form