If a labouring man has no land, no chance of making use of the right, so natural for every man, to obtain from the land his own means of support and those of his family, this is not so because the nation wants it to be so, but because certain men, the owners of land, are granted the right to admit, or not to admit, the labouring people to it. And this unnatural order of things is maintained by means of the army. If the immense wealth, accumulated by the labouring people, is not considered as belonging to all men, but to an exclusive number of men; if the power to collect taxes from labour and to use the money for anything they may see fit is entrusted to a few men; if a few men are permitted to select the method of the religious and civil instruction and education of the children; if strikes of the labourers are opposed and strikes of the capitalists are encouraged; if a few men are granted the right to compose laws, which all must obey, and to dispose of men's property and life,--all this does not take place because the nation wants it so, but because the governments and the ruling classes want it so, and by means of bodily violence establish it so. Every person who does not know this will find it out in every attempt at not conforming or at changing this order of things. Therefore armies are first of all indispensable to the governments and the ruling classes, in order to maintain the order of things which not only does not result from the necessity of the nation, but is frequently opposed to it and is advantageous only to the government and to the ruling classes. Every government needs armies, first of all, in order to keep its subjects in submission, and to exploit their labours. But the government is not alone; side by side with it there is another government, which exploits its subjects by means of the same violence, and which is always ready to take away from another government the labours of its already enslaved subjects. And so every government needs an army, not only for internal use, but also for the protection of its booty against neighbouring ravishers. Every government is in consequence of this involuntarily led to the necessity of increasing its army in emulation with the other governments; but the increasing of armies is contagious, as Montesquieu remarked 150 years ago. Every increase of an army in a state, directed against its subjects, becomes dangerous even for its neighbours, and evokes an increase in the neighbouring states.