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244 f5'!i6l .,,! INQUIRIES AND STUDIES

civil commotion or insurrection. But we shall have no
true idea of what armies exist for unless we begin with
this, perhaps in importance the highest, function of an
army. The ultimate guarantee of civil order is, in fact,
the soldier. The unarm~d policeman is nothing without
him, and no one can foresee how necessary the soldier
may at any moment become. We have a standing
illustration in the case of Ireland, where a police force
is maintained which is reaIly'a military force, and with
a large number of Regular soldiers behind it. Another
illustration is just being given in South Africa, where
the new police force is really being armed and organized
as a military body with Regular forces behind it. An
illustration of a different kind was afforded by the great
civil war in America. If the United States had been
able to dispose at the beginning of the war of a Regular
army of 100,000 or even 50,000 men, there would have
been no civil war. The losses and miseries of four
years' civil strife, with its enormous waste of human
lives, would have been entirely prevented. I t is not
cheap for a nation, therefore, even on the score of
internal policy, to be without an irresistible army for
all purposes of home defence. I put down, then, as the
first object of an army, the maintenance of civil order
in the State.
There is a special reason for mentioning this, as it
is not unconnected with the problem or ideal of a
general disarmament, of which one hears so much. The
problem is quite insoluble, for the simple reason, among
others, that internal conditions are everywhere different.
Having regard to their own home conditions, the most
orderly and law-abiding peoples might perhaps disarm
completely, or nearly so, though the danger of so doing,
as we have seen, was only too strongly illustrated in the
United States. But if they disarm they are immediately
at a disadvantage internationally in dea1ing with States
which are obliged by internal necessities to maintain
large armies-States like France, or Austria-Hungary,
or Russia, and many ot~ers. Thus the existence of