The comparative weight with which militarism, that is, the system which makes the maintenance of great armaments one of the principal objects of the state, burdens different nations, depends upon their respective wealth, the length of the terms of military service, their administrative organization and the nature of their political institutions. Upon nations which are unable to bear heavy loads of taxation, or whose finances are in a precarious state, or which suffer from official incapacity or corruption in their administrative organization, or which withdraw their young men for long periods of time from productive employments without offering through the military service any valuable compensation by way of instruction or training, the burden of great standing armaments weighs of course more heavily than upon nations whose material resources are great, or which can easily raise ample revenues, or whose administrative machinery is honest and efficient, or whose terms of military service are short, or whose young men receive in that service at least some discipline, instruction and training calculated to increase their working capacity in productive pursuits, and thus to compensate in some measure for their temporary withdrawal from such occupations.
For the purposes of this discourse the workings of militarism in France are of especial interest, on account of the political institutions of that country.
In a monarchy a standing armed force is a thing congruous with the nature of the government, and it is the more so, the more the monarchy is of the absolute type. The standing army in such a monarchy may be said to be the enlarged bodyguard of the monarch. The monarch represents an authority not springing from the periodically expressed consent of the people, and relying for the maintenance of that authority, if occasion requires, upon
