All history is a vain word, and all experience is at fault, if large War Preparations, of which the Standing Army is the type, have not been constant provocatives of war. Pretended protectors against war, they have been real instigators to war. They have excited the evil against which they were to guard. The habit of wearing arms in private life exercised a kindred influence. So long as this habit continued, society was darkened by personal combat, street-fight, duel, and assassination. The Standing Army is to the nation what the sword was to the modern gentleman, the stiletto to the Italian, the knife to the Spaniard, the pistol to our slave-master,--furnishing, like these, the means of death; and its possessor is not slow to use it. In stating the operation of this system we are not left to inference. As France, according to Sir Thomas More, shows “how dangerous it is to feed such beasts,” so does Prussia, in ever-memorable instance, which speaks now with more than ordinary authority, show precisely how the Standing Army may become the incentive to war. Frederick, the warrior king, is our witness. With honesty or impudence beyond parallel, he did not hesitate to record in his Memoirs, among the reasons for his war upon Maria Theresa, that, on coming to the throne, he found himself with “troops always ready to act.” Voltaire, when called to revise the royal memoirs, erased this confession, but preserved a copy;[218] so that by his literary activity we have this kingly authority for the mischief from a Standing Army. How complete a weapon was that army may be learned from Lafayette, who, in a letter to Washington, in 1786, after a visit to the King, described it thus:-- “Nothing can be compared to the beauty of the troops, to the discipline which reigns in all their ranks, to the simplicity of their movements, to the uniformity of their regiments.… All the situations which can be supposed in war, all the movements which these must necessitate, have been by constant habit so inculcated in their heads, that all these operations are done almost mechanically.”[219] Nothing better has been devised since the Macedonian phalanx or the Roman legion. With such a weapon ready to his hands, the King struck Maria Theresa. And think you that the present duel between France and Germany could have been waged, had not both nations found themselves, like Frederick of Prussia, with “troops always ready to act”? It was the possession of these troops which made the two parties rush so swiftly to the combat. Is not the lesson perfect? Already individuals have disarmed. Civilization requires that nations shall do likewise.