The Peril of the Republic of the United States of America - Percy T. Magan

victorious general, although it is well worthy of
remembrance that even here in the United States of
America, at the close of the Revolutionary war, at
the very threshold of our history as a republic, a
large part of the Revolutionary army, ‘turned by six
years of war from militia into seasoned veterans,’
and full of that overbearing esprit de corps
characteristic of standing armies, urged George
Washington to make himself a dictator, a monarch;
that, as one of his biographers expresses it, ‘it was
as easy for Washington to have grasped supreme
power then, as it would have been for Cæsar to
have taken the crown from Anthony upon the
Lupercal;’ and that it was only George
Washington’s patriotic loyalty and magnificent
manhood that stamped out the plot. However,
usurpation of so gross a character would now be
rendered infinitely more difficult, not only by the
republican spirit and habits of the people, but also
by our federative organization, dividing so large an
expanse of country into a multitude of selfgoverning
States.
“But even in such a country and among such a
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