fluous humanity was discharged upon such another
nuisance, the one exterminating the other, or, if both by accident
should be exterminated, what mattered it? The major part of the two
nuisances, like algebraical quantities of plus and minus, extinguished
each other. And, in any case, the result, whatever it might be, of that
one campaign, which was rather a journey terminating in a bad battle of
mobs, than anything artificial enough to deserve the title of camp,
terminated the whole war. Here, at least, we see the determining impulse
of political economy intervening, coming round upon them, if it had not
been perceived before. If the two nations began their warfare, and
planned it in defiance of all common laws and exchequers, at any rate
the time it lasted was governed by that only. The same thing recurred in
the policy of the feudal ages; the bumpkins, the vassals, were compelled
to follow the standard, but their service was limited to a certain
number of weeks. Afterwards, by law, as well as by custom, they
dissolved for the autumnal labour of the harvest. And thus it was, until
the princes would allow of mercenary armies, no system of connecting
politics grew up in Europe, or could grow up; having no means of
fighting each other, they were like leopards in Africa gnawing at a
leopard in Asia; they fumed apart like planets that could not cross; a
vast revolution, which Robertson ascribes to the reign of Francis I.,
but which I, upon far better grounds and on speculations much more
exclusively pursued, date from the age of Louis XI. Differing in
everything, and by infinite degrees for the worse from these early
centuries, the age of Semiramis agreed in this--that if the non-culture
of the human race allowed them to break out into war with little or no
preparation but what each man personally could make, and if thus far
political economy did not greatly control the policy of nations, yet in
the reaction these same violated laws vindicated their force by sad
retributions. Famines, at all events dire exhaustion, invariably put an
end to such tumultuary wars, if they did not much control their
beginnings,[42] and periodically expressed their long retributory
convulsions.

Not, therefore, because political economy was of little avail, but
because the details are lost in the wilderness of years, must we
disregard the political economy in the early Assyrian combinations of
the human race. The details are lost for political e