when there is in the native population a sufficient number of hardy men to take the field, the plutocrats, who are naturally unwarlike, fear that to send out a native army would be to arm the democracy themselves. The resource of the plutocrats is therefore to employ foreigners, who, paid by them, will at least have more reason to fight for them than for the democracy in case the two social elements should come into conflict. Thus the difficulty in Carthage and Venice did not merely arise from the want of native soldiers, but also of warlike plutocrats, to lead whatever raw material of an army there might be among the citizens. In an aristocracy the chief men are warlike and form the natural leaders of the army. In the field they in fact strengthen their supremacy, and are the more readily obeyed during peace by those whom they have commanded in war. Foreign war conducted by native troops at the expense of the state strengthens an aristocracy but weakens a plutocracy.

The result is, that the safety of nations far advanced in this stage depends upon their hirelings; and better pay or some sudden whim may easily turn them to destroy the city they have lived by saving.* The officers are generally foreigners, for in a plutocracy the military profession is sometimes regarded as a derogatory service, a consequence which naturally follows from the habit among plutocracies of estimating men only by their

This was the custom with the mercenaries which the feeble plutocracies of Greece employed against the Macedonians (see Niebuhr, Hist. Rom. iii. 478); and as to the disrepute and helplessness of Venice in matters of war, in the seventeenth century, see Burnet, who in his letters from Switzerland and Italy, 1686 (p. 147), says, "The reputation of their (the Venetian) service is of late years so much sunk, that it is very strange to see so many come to a service so decried, where there is so little regard had of the officers; the arrears are so slowly paid, and the rewards are so scantily distributed, that if they do not change their maxims, they may come to feel this very sensibly: for, as their subjects are not acquainted with warlike matters, so their nobility have no sort of ambition that way, and strangers are extremely disgusted."

wealth, for military men when there is no aristocracy are, as a class, poor. Sir William Temple, coming from a country where the officers of the army were of the highest rank and the best blood, was struck with the singularly different spectacle presented by the Dutch plutocracy and commercial democracy, which regarded all soldiers as the servants of the civilians. There is something of the same feeling to be observed between the civilians and the military in British India.

It is scarcely necessary to say that a community which is compelled to hire foreign legions does not itself send forth mercenaries for the hire of other states. The adventurers who leave nations in this stage of coexistent plutocracy and democracy, in all later stages of national existence go forth to earn their bread by civil employments. They are artisans, clerks, professors, pedagogues, doctors, teachers of languages, but never soldiers. So that the occupations of the adventurers which leave a nation, afford a sure criterion of the stage of development in which that nation is.

Thus the small states of Greece up to the days of Philip supplied hardy mercenaries to the princes and satraps of the East; in the days of the Roman empire their adventurers, instead of supplying thews and sinews for their employers, supplied them with rhetoric and philosophy. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from Italy came the hired defenders of Constantinople. The Pisan troops were with the Varanges (who were probably Danes), the only true soldiers who fought for the Greek emperort whose subjects they heartily despised, while the Greeks themselves were travelling about Europe as the teachers of languages and literature. In the fifteenth century the Italians had not only ceased to supply mercenaries, but actually themselves employed

*Mill, Political Economy, i. 62.
† Michaud, Hist. des Crois. iii. 164.

the famous condottieri, whose bands, hired by hostile cities, used to come to a mutual understanding, and keep up the show of fight without drawing each other's blood.

*

Some of these free lancers, who fought in the pay of the Italian plutocracies in the sixteenth century, were Dutchmen. A century later and the Dutch were circulating over the two hemispheres, no longer as soldiers, but as the evangelists of the arts of making wealth by commerce and peaceful handicrafts.

And so in the train of Sir John Hawkwood+ followed many a gallant Englishman, who fought for the enervated citizens that hired him. Still we can furnish volunteers to the cause of liberty in foreign lands, but when we have a heavy war we are compelled to send to the scums of the continental nations to come and fight for us. The supply we obtained during the Crimean war was of the most vile quality, for the only true mercenaries of this century are the Swiss, and they are in sufficient demand. among the despots of the Continent. Mountaineers are

nearly always strong and energetic in athletic occupations. The very nature of their country inures them to hardship, and as habitual use generates desire of use, so their thews and sinews, developed by climbing their native fastnesses, have (I would say it with the leave of theorists on volition) some influence on their desire to bear arms. The youthful swarms, fitted by their early life for the camp rather than the counting-house, go forth to make money by their valour, and now, as they did a century and a half ago, regard the military occupations with the most favour.

*St. Réal, Conjur. contre Vénise, p. 38.

† Hallam, Middle Ages, i. 499.

The writer of the "Account of Switzerland, written in 1714," p. 142, tells us that the Swiss who had served in foreign armies were most esteemed when they returned home, "both because they are the most polite, and because the trade of arms is reckoned here the most honourable. It is certain that the most considerable fortunes

If then we find a nation of which the adventurers go out as mercenaries, we may assume that it is not in this stage of coexistent civic democracy and plutocracy; and, on the contrary, we must recognise the habitual hiring of mercenaries as a sign of a nation governed by a plutocracy or by a despot. Nations do not, when they first enter this stage of plutocracy, hire mercenaries, but they do so eventually if the plutocracy gains the upper hand, and the phase of national existence lasts.

that have been made in Switzerland have been raised by military service, and chiefly of that of France; and the genius of the nation still leads the people to a soldier's life preferably to any other."

baw! Caw! Law!

CHAP. XIX.

THE TONE OF A PLUTOCRATIC SOCIETY-THE FINE ARTS.

"The characters of nations depend on the state of society in which they live, and on the political institutions established among them; and the human mind, whenever it is placed in the same situation, will in ages the most distant, and in countries the most remote, assume the same form, and be distinguished by the same manners."-ROBERTSON.

THE unwarlike character of the population in nations. in this stage of national existence must be the last item in this dry list of characteristics. There are many others which I have not named, but which a Pre-Raphaelite artist would work in with laborious and effective detail. What I have sought to seize are but the most prominent and the most vital; and let us now throw over the scene, so far as our feeble art allows, its true tone and temper.

What is it that strikes the observer in these hives of industry and opulence into which all social life in such nations concentres itself? What is it we read on the marble of their merchants' palaces, in the magnificence of their public buildings, in the glittering sumptuousness of the wares exposed for sale? What in the countenances of those merchant princes in their richly decorated halls, of that busy throng upon the crowded 'Change, --of those showy citizens in their holiday attire-of those bent and sweated forms that work in the factory gangs?