Whether arms should be entrusted to a "standing army" (that is, a body of soldiers kept permanently available for the service of the supreme magistrate and financed out of public funds), or whether they should rather be reserved to a citizen militia, is a central theme in a political tradition that descends from Machiavelli. Writings on Standing Armies is a newly collected, authoritative edition of the most important late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century pamphlets on the standing armies controversy of 1697-98. David Womersley's introduction situates these texts in the European debate about standing armies as opposed to militias and places them in the narrower context of specifically English altercations.