And what, fellow citizens, is the great good attained by these militia trainings? It is the idlest of idle dreams to suppose the recurrence, four times in the year, of such scenes as I have described, can make soldiers of our yeomanry. It may make idlers, it may make bullies, and drunkards, and gamblers of them; but what they learn of military discipline, of the subordination of a camp, is not worth a farthing candle. You lose to the state the labour of a hundred thousand men, that they may be placed under the tuition of some half-learned captain, who, perhaps, has never been in a camp, and who does not, in the course of years, teach them more than they could at any time learn as well and better in half a day's real service. The good done to the state by these militia laws is a mere shadow, and the wounds which they inflict upon the steady habits, the industry and the morality of the country, are awful and portentous. I believe I do not exceed probability in asserting, that one half of the drunkenness in the state, is induced or confirmed at these militia trainings. But it is not only in the effects upon those who obey the mandate of the law, that this system is to be deprecated. Look at it, in what light you will, it is injurious and oppressive. A large portion of your fellow citizens are men who will not, in any cause, take the life or connive at the death of a fellow creature. They believe that the great Author of being retains in his own hand the power over life, and that it is impious in mortals to assume his prerogative.--No matter how true or false this may be, it is with them an article of religious faith, and as such is held sacred by our constitution. Whatever law interferes with this article of their belief is, to them, persecution. If man has no moral right to take the life of his fellow, government can have no moral right to oblige him to do it; and they who obey the law, in preference to their conscience, are traitors to their God. If they obey your military requisition, they become a party to a system altogether at variance with their faith. They cannot pay the fines which you impose for their refusal, for you demand them as an equivalent for what they cannot concede to you. Here then are they placed, without (according to their belief) the power of moving. If you insist upon the payment, you must despoil them of their goods. It is to be sure alleged, that the state cannot, with a due regard to its own safety, dispense with the military allegiance of its citizens. Admit this to be the case. Do you, in abstaining from the petty, alienating vexations of a militia law in time of peace, yield or forego the claim to this allegiance? You pass an edict oppressive to a class of citizens, whose motive for non-compliance is sacred in the eye of the constitution,--an edict, which your experience of the past assures you, they will not comply with, and you create, in order to enforce it, a race of harpies, who are trained under it in all