vil
staff preserves for itself its future recruits; it is from nineteen to
twenty-six that the future chiefs and under-chiefs of the great work
of peaceful and fruitful labor, the savants, artists or scholars, the
jurisconsults, engineers or physicians, the enterprising men of commerce
or of industry, receive and undertake for themselves a special and
superior education, discover or acquire their leading ideas, and
elaborate their originality or their competency. If talent is to be
deprived of these productive years their growth is arrested in full
vegetation, and civil capacities, not less precious for the State than
military capacities, are rendered abortive.[3271]--Towards 1804,[3272]
owing to substitution, one conscript out of five in the rural districts,
one conscript out of seven in the towns, and, on the average, one
conscript out of ten in France, escapes this forced abortive condition;
in 1806, the price of a substitute varies from eighteen hundred to four
thousand francs,[3273] and as capital is scarce, and ready money still
more so, a sum like this is sufficiently large. Accordingly, it is the
rich or well-to-do class, in other words the more or less cultivated
class, which buys off its sons: reliance may be placed on their giving
them more or less complete culture. In this way, it prevents the State
from mowing down all its sprouting wheat and preserves a nursery
of subjects among which society is to find its future elite.--Thus
attenuated, the military law is still rigid enough: nevertheless
it remains endurable. It is only towards 1807[3274] that it becomes
monstrous and grows worse and worse from year to year until it becomes
the sepulcher of all French youth, even to taking as canon fodder the
adolescent under age and men already exempt or free by purchase. But,
as before these excesses, it may still be maintained with certain
modifications; it suffices almost to retouch it, to establish exemptions
and the privilege of substitution as rights, which were once simply
favors,[3275] reduce the annual contingent, limit the term of service,
guarantee their lasting freedom to those liberated, and thus secure in
1818 a recruiting law satisfactory and efficacious which, for more than
half a century, will attain its ends without being too detrimental
or too odious, and which, among so many laws of the same sort, all
mischievous, is perhaps the least pernicious.

*****

[Footnote 3201: "The Ancient Regime," b