ngst those in which birth
is the only source of rank, the same inequality exists in the army as
in the nation; the officer is noble, the soldier is a serf; the one is
naturally called upon to command, the other to obey. In aristocratic
armies, the private soldier's ambition is therefore circumscribed within
very narrow limits. Nor has the ambition of the officer an unlimited
range. An aristocratic body not only forms a part of the scale of ranks
in the nation, but it contains a scale of ranks within itself: the
members of whom it is composed are placed one above another, in a
particular and unvarying manner. Thus one man is born to the command of
a regiment, another to that of a company; when once they have reached
the utmost object of their hopes, they stop of their own accord, and
remain contented with their lot. There is, besides, a strong cause,
which, in aristocracies, weakens the officer's desire of promotion.
Amongst aristocratic nations, an officer, independently of his rank
in the army, also occupies an elevated rank in society; the former is
almost always in his eyes only an appendage to the latter. A nobleman
who embraces the profession of arms follows it less from motives of
ambition than from a sense of the duties imposed on him by his birth.
He enters the army in order to find an honorable employment for the idle
years of his youth, and to be able to bring back to his home and his
peers some honorable recollections of military life; but his principal
object is not to obtain by that profession either property, distinction,
or power, for he possesses these advantages in his own right, and enjoys
them without leaving his home.

In democratic armies all the soldiers may become officers, which makes
the desire of promotion general, and immeasurably extends the bounds
of military ambition. The officer, on his part, sees nothing which
naturally and necessarily stops him at one grade more than at another;
and each grade has immense importance in his eyes, because his rank
in society almost always depends on his rank in the army. Amongst
democratic nations it often happens that an officer has no property but
his pay, and no distinction but that of military honors: consequently as
often as his duties change, his fortune changes, and he becomes, as
it were, a new man. What was only an appendage to his position in
aristocratic armies, has thus become the main point, the basis of his
whole condition. Under the old Fren