To one so peculiarly jealous of encroachments by the central power upon the privileges of the States, the proposition had additional objections. Mr. Davis had hoped to avoid the necessity of a measure, so much after the manner of military despotism, and sought to take advantage of the patriotic ardor exhibited upon the first rush to arms, by inducing enlistments for the war. Especially distasteful was a resort to compulsion into the ranks, in a war the success of which necessarily depended upon the voluntary and patriotic aid of the people, while the enemy, without difficulty, raised a half million of men for their schemes of conquest. Second to the object of independence only, the controlling aspiration of President Davis was, that the war might not terminate in the destruction of civil liberty. With evident pride, he proclaimed the honorable fact that, "through all the necessities of an unequal struggle, there has been no act on our part to impair personal liberty or the freedom of speech, of thought, or of the press."[45] His consistent regard for civil liberty was preserved even in instances where additions to the executive authority would result. The rôle of Louis Quatorze, of Frankenstein, or of Cæsar, presented no attractions to the republican executive, whose position and authority were, themselves, a protest against the exercise of arbitrary and ungranted powers. It is a striking evidence of the contempt for consistency, manifested by Mr. Davis' assailants, that these virtues, so commendable in the executive of a free people, should then have actually constituted the ground of accusation, by those who subsequently charged him with an ambition to unite in himself all the departments of the Government. There arose, at this time, a demagogical demand for a "Dictator"--that morbid aspiration characteristic of men of weak nerve and deficient fortitude, which vainly seeks to make Government more powerful for good purposes, by removing all restraints upon its power to do evil. Emphatic in the assertion of the authority conferred by the Constitution upon his position, President Davis was no less persistent in his refusal to countenance the investiture of himself with dictatorial powers.