For such reasons as these the disbanding of the forces was strongly recommended.  Parliament, it was said, might perhaps, from respect and tenderness for the person of His Majesty, permit him to have guards enough to escort his coach and to pace the rounds before his palace.  But this was the very utmost that it would be right to concede.  The defence of the realm ought to be confided to the sailors and the militia.  Even the Tower ought to have no garrison except the trainbands of the Tower Hamlets.

It must be evident to every intelligent and dispassionate man that these declaimers contradicted themselves.  If an army composed of regular troops really was far more efficient than an army composed of husbandmen taken from the plough and burghers taken from the counter, how could the country be safe with no defenders but husbandmen and burghers, when a great prince, who was our nearest neighbour, who had a few months before been our enemy, and who might, in a few months, be our enemy again, kept up not less than a hundred and fifty thousand regular troops?  If, on the other hand, the spirit of the English people was such that they would, with little or no training, encounter and defeat the most formidable array of veterans from the continent, was it not absurd to apprehend that such a people could be reduced to slavery by a few regiments of their own countrymen?  But our ancestors were generally so much blinded by prejudice that this inconsistency passed unnoticed.  They were secure where they ought to have been wary, and timorous where they might well have been secure.  They were not shocked by hearing the same man maintain, in the same breath, that, if twenty thousand professional soldiers were kept up, the liberty and property of millions of Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Crown, and yet that those millions of Englishmen, fighting for liberty and property, would speedily annihilate an invading army composed of fifty or sixty thousand of the conquerors of Steinkirk and Landen.  Whoever denied the former proposition was called a tool of the Court.  Whoever denied the latter was accused of insulting and slandering the nation.

Somers was too wise to oppose himself directly to the strong current of popular feeling.  With rare dexterity he took the tone, not of an advocate, but of a judge.  The danger which seemed so terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to pronounce altogether visionary.  But he reminded his countrymen that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to the wisest of mankind.  No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a perfect and immortal form of government.  Perils lay thick on the right and on the left; and to keep far from one evil was to draw near to another.  That which, considered merely with reference to the internal polity of England, might be, to a certain extent, objectionable, might be absolutely essential to her rank among European Powers, and even to her independence.  All that