d reward it? You imagine
yourselves to be the army of England: how if you should find yourselves,
at last, only the police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of
her little Bethels?

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever; but what I want you
to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not
mere passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no country
is in a healthy state which has separated, even in a small degree, her
civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great,
fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less
instant form of error (because involving no national taint of
cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal--it is the error
especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the
calamitous consequences--to take away the best blood and strength of the
nation, all the soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless of
reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust; and to cast that
into steel, and make a mere sword of it; taking away its voice and will;
but to keep the worst part of the nation--whatever is cowardly,
avaricious, sensual, and faithless--and to give to this the voice, to
this the authority, to this the chief privilege, where there is least
capacity, of thought. The fulfilment of your vow for the defence of
England will by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are
not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect
shop-boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to his country is
that he will die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her
righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A
state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he is bound
_not_ to defend; nay, bound to redress by his own right hand that which
he sees to be base in her. So sternly is this the law of Nature and
life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a
military despotism--never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the
health of any state consists simply in this: that in it, those who are
wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should be also its soldiers;
or, rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers its
rulers. Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of England has on the
heart of England, in that they are still always in front of her battles,
this hold will not be enough, unless