he practice of
honestly paying them. [41]

By plundering the public creditor, it was possible to make an income of
about fourteen hundred thousand pounds, with some occasional help from
Versailles, support the necessary charges of the government and the
wasteful expenditure of the court. For that load which pressed most
heavily on the finances of the great continental states was here
scarcely felt. In France, Germany, and the Netherlands, armies, such
as Henry the Fourth and Philip the Second had never employed in time
of war, were kept up in the midst of peace. Bastions and raveling
were everywhere rising, constructed on principles unknown to Parma and
Spinola. Stores of artillery and ammunition were accumulated, such as
even Richelieu, whom the preceding generation had regarded as a worker
of prodigies, would have pronounced fabulous. No man could journey many
leagues in those countries without hearing the drums of a regiment
on march, or being challenged by the sentinels on the drawbridge of a
fortress. In our island, on the contrary, it was possible to live long
and to travel far without being once reminded, by any martial sight or
sound, that the defence of nations had become a science and a calling.
The majority of Englishmen who were under twenty-five years of age had
probably never seen a company of regular soldiers. Of the cities which,
in the civil war, had valiantly repelled hostile armies, scarcely one
was now capable of sustaining a siege The gates stood open night and
day. The ditches were dry. The ramparts had been suffered to fall into
decay, or were repaired only that the townsfolk might have a pleasant
walk on summer evenings. Of the old baronial keeps many had been
shattered by the cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, and lay in heaps of
ruin, overgrown with ivy. Those which remained had lost their martial
character, and were now rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were
turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with
fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to summer houses
adorned with mirrors and paintings. [42] On the capes of the sea coast,
and on many inland hills, were still seen tall posts, surmounted by
barrels. Once those barrels had been filled with pitch. Watchmen had
been set round them in seasons of danger; and, within a few hours after
a Spanish sail had been discovered in the Channel, or after a thousand
Scottish mosstroopers had crossed the Tweed, the