other districts
than our own native _officinae_ of population. The Life Guards (1st
regiment) and the Blues (2nd) recruit chiefly, or did so thirty years
ago, in Yorkshire. This is a manufacturing county, though in a mode of
manufacturing which escapes many evils of the factory system. And
generally we are little disposed pedantically to disparage towns as
funds of a good soldiery. Men of mighty bone and thews, sons of Anak, to
our own certain knowledge, arise in Kendal, Wakefield, Bradford and
Leeds; huge men, by thousands, amongst the spinners and weavers of
Glasgow, Paisley, etc., well able to fight their way through battalions
of clod-hoppers whose talk is of oxen. But, unless in times subject to
special distress, it is not so easy to tempt away the weaver from his
loom as the delver from his spade. We believe the reason to be, that the
monotony of a rustic life is more oppressive to those who have limited
resources than the corresponding monotony of a town life. For this
reason, and for many others, it is certain--and perhaps (unless we get
to fighting with steam-men) it will continue to be certain through
centuries--that, for the main staple of her armies and her navies,
England must depend upon the quality of her bold peasantry and noble
yeomanry; for we must remember that, of those huge-limbed men who are
found in the six northern counties of England and in the Scottish
Lowlands, of those elegantly-formed men who are found in Devonshire,
Cornwall, etc., of those _hardy_ men (a feature in human physics still
more important) who are found in every district--if many are now
resident in towns, most of them originated in rustic life; and from
rustic life it is that the reservoir of towns is permanently fed. Rome
was, England never will be, independent of her rural population. Rome
never had a yeomanry, Rome never had a race of country gentlemen;
England has both upon a scale so truly noble that it will be the
simplest expression of that nobility to say, pointing to our villages,
'Behold the cradle of our army!' as inversely to say, pointing to that
army: 'Behold the manhood of our villages!' As regards Rome, from the
bisection of the Roman territory into two several corn districts
depending upon a separate agriculture, it results that _her_ wealth
could not be defeated and transferred; secondly, it results from the
total subjection of Egypt, that no embargo _could_ be laid on the
harvests of the Nile, and no famine _