w, to court the soldiers, to give way to them; he alone
has to obey: all the rest if disolution and free licence. It pleases me
to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by
how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases
me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice,
every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion.
Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation. We had
ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and
good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to
intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to
restore it:

"Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,
Ne prohibete."

["Forbid not, at least, that this young man repair this ruined age."
--Virgil, Georg., i. 500. Montaigne probably refers to Henry, king
of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV.]

What has become of the old precept, "That soldiers ought more to fear
their chief than the enemy"?--[Valerius Maximus, Ext. 2.]--and of that
wonderful example, that an orchard being enclosed within the precincts of
a camp of the Roman army, was seen at their dislodgment the next day in
the same condition, not an apple, though ripe and delicious, being pulled
off, but all left to the possessor? I could wish that our youth, instead
of the time they spend in less fruitful travels and less honourable
employments, would bestow one half of that time in being an eye-witness
of naval exploits, under some good captain of Rhodes, and the other half
in observing the discipline of the Turkish armies; for they have many
differences and advantages over ours; one of these is, that our soldiers
become more licentious in expeditions, theirs more temperate and
circumspect; for the thefts and insolencies committed upon the common
people, which are only punished with a cudgel in peace, are capital in
war; for an egg taken by a Turkish soldier without paying for it, fifty
blows with a stick is the fixed rate; for anything else, of what sort or
how trivial soever, not necessary to nourishment, they are presently
impaled or beheaded without mercy. I am astonished, in the history of
Selim, the most cruel conqueror that ever was, to see that when he
subdued Egypt, the beautiful gardens about Damascus being all open, and
in a conquered land, and his army encamped upon the v