On the record
Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death.
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gutenberg.orgJames Blaine: “Long experience has shown that armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of…”
Editor's note · Context
Blaine discusses the harsh realities of maintaining armies, advocating for severe penalties for desertion.
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Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.
If this view of the subject be correct, as I think it is, then the Union must utterly perish at the moment when Congress shall arm one part of the people against another for any purpose beyond that of merely protecting the General…
But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.
Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.
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