• It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

    Edward Gibbon: It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.
    Edward Gibbon (1831). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, p.61