han to the understanding, and presented indeed a
final restraining force to these kings also. For examine these wars,
fabulous as they are; look into the when, the whence, the how; into the
duration of the campaigns, into their objects, and into the quality of
the troops, into the circumstances under which they were trained and
fought, and this will abundantly appear.

Certainly, the commissariat which we do by foresight, they did by brute
efforts of power; but the leading economical laws which are now clear to
us, and which, with full perception of their inevitable operation, we
take into account, made themselves felt in the last result if only then
blindly realized; and in the fact that these laws are now clearly
apprehended lies the prevailing reason that modern wars must, on the
side alike of the commissariat and of social effects in various
directions, be widely different from war in ancient times.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] One pretended proof of a decline is found in the supposed
substitution of slave labour for free Italian labour. This began, it is
urged, on the opening of the Nile corn trade. Unfortunately, that is a
mere romance. Ovid, describing rural appearances in Italy when as yet
the trade was hardly in its infancy, speaks of the rustic labourer as
working in fetters. Juvenal, in an age when the trade had been vastly
expanded, notices the same phenomenon almost in the same terms.

[22] 'The best raw material.' Some people hold that the Romans and
Italians were a cowardly nation. We doubt this on the whole. Physically,
however, they were inferior to their neighbours. It is certain that the
Transalpine Gauls were a conspicuously taller race. Caesar says: 'Gallis,
prae magnitudine corporum quorum, brevitas nostra contemptui est' ('Bell.
Gall.' 2, 30 _fin_.); and the Germans, in a still higher degree, were
both larger men and every way more powerful. The kites, says Juvenal,
had never feasted on carcases so huge as those of the Cimbri and
Teutones. But this physical superiority, though great for special
purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the
legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily
labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to
single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good)
discipline--that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous
modes of contest.

[23] '_Any considerable portion of this provincial