true, were not so much
disquieted by the immorality attending it, as they were by the
insecurity, costliness, and unceasing disputes which it involved, as
well as by the reclamations of foreign governments. The recruiting
officers were themselves often bad and untrustworthy men, whose
proceedings and disbursements could with difficulty be controlled. Not
a few lived for years a life of dissipation, with their accomplices, in
foreign countries at the cost of their monarchs; charged exorbitant
bounties, only succeeded in ensnaring a few, and could scarcely get
these into the country. It soon followed that not half of those so
enlisted ever became available to the army; for the greater part were
the worst rabble, into whom military qualities could not always be
flogged, whose diseased bodies and vicious habits filled the hospitals
and prisons, and who ran away on the first opportunity.

The enlisting in the interior was carried on with every kind of
violence; the officers and recruiting sergeants seized and carried off
only sons who ought to have been exempt; students from the
Universities, and whole colonies of villeins whom they settled on their
own properties. Whoever wished to be exempt, was obliged to bribe, and
was not even then safe. The officers were so protected in their violent
extortions, that they openly despised all legal restraints. If there
happened to be a great deficiency of men in time of war, all regard for
law ceased. Then a formal, razzia was arranged, the city gates were
beset by guards, and every one who went in or out subjected to a
fearful examination, and whoever was tall and strong was seized; houses
were broken into, and recruits were sought for from cellar to garret,
even in families that ought to have been exempt. In the Seven Years'
War, the Prussians even endeavoured to catch the scholars of the upper
forms of the public schools in Silesia, for military service. In many
families still lives the remembrance of the terror and danger
occasioned to the grandfathers by the recruiting system. It was then a
great misfortune for the sons of the clergy or officials to grow tall,
and the usual warning of anxious parents was, "Do not grow, or you will
be caught by the recruiting officer."

Almost worse were the illegalities practised by the recruiting
sergeants seeking for recruits in foreign countries. The recruit was
bound by the reception of the money; and the well-known man[oe]uvre was
to make si