in the Netherlands.  Every thing must then be staked on the steadiness of the militia; and it was pernicious flattery to represent the militia as equal to a conflict in the field with veterans whose whole life had been a preparation for the day of battle.  The instances which it was the fashion to cite of the great achievements of soldiers taken from the threshing floor and the shopboard were fit only for a schoolboy’s theme.  Somers, who had studied ancient literature like a man,—­a rare thing in his time,—­said that those instances refuted the doctrine which they were meant to prove.  He disposed of much idle declamation about the Lacedaemonians by saying, most concisely, correctly and happily, that the Lacedaemonian commonwealth really was a standing army which threatened all the rest of Greece.  In fact, the Spartan had no calling except war.  Of arts, sciences and letters he was ignorant.  The labour of the spade and of the loom, and the petty gains of trade, he contemptuously abandoned to men of a lower caste.  His whole existence from childhood to old age was one long military training.  Meanwhile the Athenian, the Corinthian, the Argive, the Theban, gave his chief attention to his oliveyard or his vineyard, his warehouse or his workshop, and took up his shield and spear only for short terms and at long intervals.  The difference therefore between a Lacedaemonian phalanx and any other phalanx was long as great as the difference between a regiment of the French household troops and a regiment of the London trainbands.  Lacedaemon consequently continued to be dominant in Greece till other states began to employ regular troops.  Then her supremacy was at an end.  She was great while she was a standing army among militias.  She fell when she had to contend with other standing armies.  The lesson which is really to be learned from her ascendency and from her decline is this, that the occasional soldier is no match for the professional soldier.2

The same lesson Somers drew from the history of Rome; and every scholar who really understands that history will admit that he was in the right.  The finest militia that ever existed was probably that of Italy in the third century before Christ.  It might have been thought that seven or eight hundred thousand fighting men, who assuredly wanted neither natural courage nor public spirit, would have been able to protect their own hearths and altars against an invader.  An invader came, bringing with him an army small and exhausted by a march over the snows of the Alps, but familiar with battles and sieges.  At the head of this army he traversed the peninsula to and fro, gained a succession of victories against immense numerical odds, slaughtered the hardy youth of Latium like sheep, by tens of thousands, encamped under the walls of Rome, continued during sixteen years to maintain himself in a hostile country, and was never dislodged till he had by a cruel discipline gradually taught his adversaries how to resist him.