Unlike today, in the 18th and 19th centuries professional career soldiers were seen more like mercenaries, primarily interested in a paycheck. It was the civilians who volunteered and organized during moments of crisis who were the real patriots, loftily motivated by high ideals of the responsibility of citizenship.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1814 that the Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army.
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