there to search more inquisitively into the
special details? Where all were ready to fight cheerfully, why seek for
separate _minutiae_ as to each particular class? Those general returns
had regard only to the ordinary _causa belli_--a hostile invasion. And,
then, all nations alike, rude or refined, have gone upon the same
general outline of computation--that, subtracting the females from the
males, this, in a gross general way, would always bisect the total
return of the population. And, then, to make a second bisection of the
male half would subtract one quarter from the entire people as too young
or too old, or otherwise as too infirm for warlike labours, leaving
precisely one quarter of the nation--every fourth head--as available for
war. This process for David's case would have yielded perhaps about
1,100,000 fighting men throughout Palestine. But this unwieldy
_pospolite_ was far from meeting David's secret anxieties. He had
remarked the fickle and insurrectionary state of the people. Even
against himself how easy had it been found to organize a sudden
rebellion, and to conceal it so prosperously that he and his whole court
saved themselves from capture only by a few hours' start of the enemy,
and through the enemy's want of cavalry. This danger meantime having
vanished, it might be possible that for David personally no other great
conspiracy should disturb his seat upon the throne. None of David's sons
approached to Absalom in popularity; and yet the subsequent attempt of
Adonijah showed that the revolutionary temper was still awake in that
quarter. But what David feared, in a further-looking spirit, was the
tenure by which his immediate descendants would maintain their title.
The danger was this: over and above the want of any principle for
regulating the succession, and this want operating in a state of things
far less determined than amongst monogamous nations--one son pleading
his priority of birth; another, perhaps, his mother's higher rank, a
third pleading his very juniority, inasmuch as this brought him within
the description of _porphyrogeniture_, or royal birth, which is often
felt as transcendent as _primogeniture_--even the people, apart from the
several pretenders to the throne, would create separate interests as
grounds for insurrection or for intestine feuds. There seems good reason
to think that already the ten tribes, Israel as opposed to Judah, looked
upon the more favoured and royal tribe of Jud