The subdivision of arts and professions, in, certain examples, tends to
improve the practice of them, and to promote their ends. By having
separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better
supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the
citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to
dismember the human character, and to destroy those very arts we mean to
improve. By this separation, we in effect deprive a free people of what is
necessary to their safety; or we prepare a defence against invasions from
abroad, which gives a prospect of usurpation, and threatens the
establishment of military government at home.
We may be surprised to find the beginning of certain military instructions
at Rome, referred to a time no earlier than that of the Cimbric war. It was
then, we are told by Valerius Maximus, that Roman soldiers were made to
learn from gladiators the use of a sword: and the antagonists of Pyrrhus
and of Hannibal were, by the account of this writer, still in need of
instruction in the first rudiments of their trade.
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