could
get a commission in the army. [W. H. S.]

18. '_Est et alia causa, cur attenuatae sint legiones_,' says
Vegetius. 'Magnus in illis labor est militandi, graviora arma, sera
munera, severior disciplila. Quod vitantes plerique, in auxiliis
festinant militiae sacramenta percipere, ubi et minor sudor, et
maturiora sunt premia.' Lib._ II. _cap._ 3. [W. H. S.] Vegetius,
according to Gibbon and his most recent editor (_recensuit Carolus
Lang. Editio altera. Lipsiae, Teubner_, 1885), flourished during the
reign of Valentinian III (A.D. 425-55). His 'Soldier's Pocket-book'
is entitled 'Flavi Vegeti Renati Epitoma Rei Militaris'.

'Montesquieu thought that 'the Government had better have stuck to
the old practice of slitting noses and cutting off ears, since the
French soldiers, like the Roman dandies under Pompey, must
necessarily have a greater dread of a disfigured face than of death.
It did not occur to him that France could retain her soldiers by
other and better motives. See _Spirit of Laws_, book vi, chap. 12.
See _Necker on the Finances_, vol. ii, chap. 5; vol. iii, chap. 34. A
day-labourer on the roads got fifteen sous a day; and a French
soldier only six, at the very time that the mortality of an army of
forty thousand men sent to the colonies was annually 13,333, or about
one in three. In our native army the sepoy gets about double the
wages of an ordinary day-labourer; and his duties, when well done,
involve just enough of exercise to keep him in health. The casualties
are perhaps about one in a hundred. [W. H. S.]

20. Just precisely what the French soldiers were after the revolution
had purged France of all 'the perilous stuff that weighed upon the
heart' of its people. Gibbon, in considering the chance of the
civilized nations of Europe ever being again overrun by the
barbarians from the North, as in the time of the Romans, says: 'If a
savage conqueror should issue from the deserts of Tartary, he must
repeatedly vanquish the robust peasantry of Russia, the numerous
armies of Germany, the gallant nobles of France, and the intrepid
free men of Britain.' Never was a more just, yet more unintended
satire upon the state of a country. Russia was to depend upon her
'robust peasantry'; Germany upon her 'numerous armies'; England upon
her 'intrepid free men'; and poor France upon her 'gallant nobles'
alone; because, unhappily, no other part of her vast population was
then ever thought of. When the hour of trial cam