abits and morality of the antique city and of
the barbarous tribe

is only too well known.[3262] It is sufficient for us to place the two
military systems face to face, that of former times and that of to-day:
formerly, in Europe, a few soldiers, some hundreds of thousands; to-day,
in Europe, 18 millions of actual or eventual soldiers, all the adults,
even the married, even fathers of families summoned or subject to call
for twenty-five years of their life, that is to say, as long as they
continue able-bodied men; formerly, for the heaviest part of the service
in France, no lives are confiscated by decree, only those bought by
contract, and lives suited to this business and elsewhere idle or
mischievous; about one hundred and fifty thousand lives of inferior
quality, of mediocre value, which the State could expend with less
regret than others, and the sacrifice of which is not a serious injury
to society or to civilization. To-day, for the same service in France,
4 millions of lives are taken by authority, and, if they attempt to
escape, taken by force; all of them, from the twentieth year onward,
employed in the same manual and murderous pursuit, including the least
suited to the purpose and the best adapted to other purposes, including
the most inventive and the most fecund, the most delicate and the most
cultivated, those remarkable for superior talent (Page 232/526)who
are of almost infinite social value, and whose forced collapse, or
precocious end, is a calamity for the human species.

Such is the terminal fruit of the new Regime; military duty is here the
counterpart, and as it were, the ransom of political right; the modern
citizen may balance one with the other like two weights in the scale. On
the one side, he may place his prerogative as sovereign, that is to say,
in point of fact, the faculty every four years of giving one vote among
ten thousand for the election or non-election of one deputy among six
hundred and fifty; on the other side, he may place his positive, active
service, three, four or five years of barrack life and of passive
obedience, and then twenty-eight days more, then a thirteen-days'
summons in honor of the flag, and, for twenty years, at each rumor of
war, anxiously waiting for the word of command which obliges him to
shoulder his gun and slay with his own hand, or be slain. He will
probably end by discovering that the two sides of the scales do not
balance and that a right so hollow is