them, and poor men dare not do it,
knowing that one who has been bred up in idleness and pleasure, and who
was used to walk about with his sword and buckler, despising all the
neighbourhood with an insolent scorn as far below him, is not fit for the
spade and mattock; nor will he serve a poor man for so small a hire and
in so low a diet as he can afford to give him.' To this he answered,
'This sort of men ought to be particularly cherished, for in them
consists the force of the armies for which we have occasion; since their
birth inspires them with a nobler sense of honour than is to be found
among tradesmen or ploughmen.' 'You may as well say,' replied I, 'that
you must cherish thieves on the account of wars, for you will never want
the one as long as you have the other; and as robbers prove sometimes
gallant soldiers, so soldiers often prove brave robbers, so near an
alliance there is between those two sorts of life. But this bad custom,
so common among you, of keeping many servants, is not peculiar to this
nation. In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people, for
the whole country is full of soldiers, still kept up in time of peace (if
such a state of a nation can be called a peace); and these are kept in
pay upon the same account that you plead for those idle retainers about
noblemen: this being a maxim of those pretended statesmen, that it is
necessary for the public safety to have a good body of veteran soldiers
ever in readiness. They think raw men are not to be depended on, and
they sometimes seek occasions for making war, that they may train up
their soldiers in the art of cutting throats, or, as Sallust observed,
"for keeping their hands in use, that they may not grow dull by too long
an intermission." But France has learned to its cost how dangerous it is
to feed such beasts. The fate of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians,
and many other nations and cities, which were both overturned and quite
ruined by those standing armies, should make others wiser; and the folly
of this maxim of the French appears plainly even from this, that their
trained soldiers often find your raw men prove too hard for them, of
which I will not say much, lest you may think I flatter the English.
Every day's experience shows that the mechanics in the towns or the
clowns in the country are not afraid of fighting with those idle
gentlemen, if they are not disabled by some misfortune in their body or
dispirited by ex