_ than nothing!

Our War Offices, Admiralties, and other Fighting Establishments, are
forcing themselves on everybody's attention at this time. Bull grumbles
audibly: "The money you have cost me these five-and-thirty years, during
which you have stood elaborately ready to fight at any moment, without
at any moment being called to fight, is surely an astonishing sum. The
National Debt itself might have been half paid by that money, which has
all gone in pipe-clay and blank cartridges! "Yes, Mr. Bull, the
money can be counted in hundreds of millions; which certainly is
something:--but the "strenuously organized idleness," and what mischief
that amounts to,--have you computed it? A perpetual solecism, and
blasphemy (of its sort), set to march openly among us, dressed in
scarlet! Bull, with a more and more sulky tone, demands that such
solecism be abated; that these Fighting Establishments be as it were
disbanded, and set to do some work in the Creation, since fighting
there is now none for them. This demand is irrefragably just, is growing
urgent too; and yet this demand cannot be complied with,--not yet while
the State grounds itself on unrealities, and Downing Street continues
what it is.

The old Romans made their soldiers work during intervals of war. The New
Downing Street too, we may predict, will have less and less tolerance
for idleness on the part of soldiers or others. Nay the New Downing
Street, I foresee, when once it has got its "_Industrial_ Regiments"
organized, will make these mainly do its fighting, what fighting
there is; and so save immense sums. Or indeed, all citizens of the
Commonwealth, as is the right and the interest of every free man in
this world, will have themselves trained to arms; each citizen ready to
defend his country with his own body and soul,--he is not worthy to have
a country otherwise. In a State grounded on veracities, that would be
the rule. Downing Street, if it cannot bethink itself of returning to
the veracities, will have to vanish altogether!

To fight with its neighbors never was, and is now less than ever, the
real trade of England. For far other objects was the English People
created into this world; sent down from the Eternities, to mark with its
history certain spaces in the current of sublunary Time! Essential, too,
that the English People should discover what its real objects are; and
resolutely follow these, resolutely refusing to follow other than these.
The Stat