For England we may say of this case—Transeat in exemplum!
Great Britain, on the contrary, is limited in her recruiting-grounds by modern political relations as respects Europe: she has formed an excellent foreign corps long ago in the Mediterranean; a Hessian corps in America; an admirable Hanoverian legion during the late war. But circumstances too often prevent her relying (as the Romans did) on the perfection of her military system so far as to dispense with native materials; except, indeed, in the East, where the Roman principle is carried out to the widest extent, needing only one-tenth of British by way of model and inspiration under circumstances of peculiar trial! In African stations also, in the West Indies and on the American continent (as in Honduras), England proceeds (though insufficiently) upon this fine Roman principle, making her theory, her discipline, and the network of her rules do the work of her own too costly hands. She, like Rome, finds the benefit of her fine system chiefly in the dispensation which it facilitates from working with any exhaustible fund of means. Excellent must be that workmanship which can afford to be careless about its materials; yet still—where naturally and essentially it must be said that materiem superabat opus, because one section of our martial service moves by nautical soldiers, and with respect to the other half because it is necessary to meet European troops by men of British blood—we cannot, for European purposes, look to any other districts than our own native officinæ 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 could be organized against Rome; thirdly, it results that the Roman military system was thus not liable to be affected by any dependency upon foreign grain. On the argument that this dependency had always been proceeding gradually in Italy, so as virtually to reimburse itself by vicarious culture, whereas in England the transition from independency to dependency, being accomplished (if at all) in one day by Act of Parliament, would be ruinously abrupt; and also on the argument B, that Rome, if slowly losing any recruiting districts at home, found compensatory districts all round the Mediterranean, whilst England could find no such compensatory districts—we deny that the circumstances of the Roman corn trade have ever been stated truly; and we expect the thanks of our readers for drawing their attention to this outline of the points which essentially differenced it from the modern corn trade of England. England must, but Rome could not, reap from a foreign corn dependency: firstly, ruinous disturbance to the natural expansions of her wealth; secondly, famine by intervals for her vast population; thirdly, impoverishment to her recruiting service. These are the dreadful evils (some uniform, some contingent) which England would inherit of her native agriculture, but which Rome escaped under that partial transfer, never really accomplished. Meantime, let the reader remember that it is Rome, and not England—Rome historically, not England politically—which forms the object of our exposure. England is but the means of the illustration.
In our own days wars in their ebbs and flows are but another name for the resources of the national exchequer, or expressions of its artificial facilities for turning those resources to account. The great artifice of anticipation applied to national income—an artifice sure to follow where civilization has expanded, and which would have arisen to Rome had her civilization been either (A) completely developed, or (B) expanded originally from a true radix—has introduced a new era into national history. The man who, having had property, invests in the Funds, and divides between his grandchildren and the five subsequent generations what will yield them subsistence, is the author of an expansive improvement which has been enjoyed by all in turn, and with more fixed assurance in the last case than in the first. He is a public benefactor in more ways than appears on the surface: he takes the most efficient guarantees against needless wars.
Captain Jenkins's ears[26] might have been redeemed at a less price; but still the war taught a lesson, which, if avoidable at that instant, was certainly blamable; but it had its use in enforcing on other nations the conviction that England washed out insult with retribution, and for every drop of blood wantonly spilt demanded an ocean in return. Perhaps you will say this was no great improvement on the old. No; not in appearance, it may be; but that was because war had to open a field which mere diplomacy, unsupported by the sword, could not open, and secured what we may well call a moral result in the eye of the whole world, which diplomacy could not secure in our guilty Europe. But was that, you ask, a condition to be contemplated with complete satisfaction? No; nor is it right that it should. But the dawn of a new era is approaching, for which that may have done its instalment of preparation. Not that war will cease for many generations, but that it will continually move more in greater subjection to national laws and Christian opinion. Nevermore will it be excited by mere court intrigue, or even by ministerial necessities. No more will a quarrel between two ladies about a pair of gloves, or a fit of ill-temper in a prince toward his minister, call forth the dread scourge by way of letting off personal irritation or redressing the balance of parties.
Funding, therefore, was a great step in advance; and even already we have only to look into the Exchequer in order to read the possibilities, the ebbs and flows of war beforehand. This consideration of money, it is true—even as the sinews of war—was not so great in ancient history. And the reason is evident. Kings did not then go to war by money, but for money. They did not look into the Exchequer for the means of a campaign, but they looked into a campaign for the means of an Exchequer. Yet even in these nations, more of their history, of their doings and sufferings, lay in their economy than anywhere else. The great Oriental phantoms, such as the Pharaohs and the Sargons, did, it is true, bring nations to war without much more care for the commissariat department than is given in the battles of the Kites and Daws. Yet even there the political economy made itself felt, obscurely and indirectly it may be, but really and effectively, acting by laws that varied their force rather to the eye than to the understanding, and presented indeed a final restraining force to these kings also. For examine these wars, fabulous as they are; look into the when, the whence, the how; into the duration of the campaigns, into their objects, and into the quality of the troops, into the circumstances under which they were trained and fought, and this will abundantly appear.
Certainly, the commissariat which we do by foresight, they did by brute efforts of power; but the leading economical laws which are now clear to us, and which, with full perception of their inevitable operation, we take into account, made themselves felt in the last result if only then blindly realized; and in the fact that these laws are now clearly apprehended lies the prevailing reason that modern wars must, on the side alike of the commissariat and of social effects in various directions, be widely different from war in ancient times.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] One pretended proof of a decline is found in the supposed substitution of slave labour for free Italian labour. This began, it is urged, on the opening of the Nile corn trade. Unfortunately, that is a mere romance. Ovid, describing rural appearances in Italy when as yet the trade was hardly in its infancy, speaks of the rustic labourer as working in fetters. Juvenal, in an age when the trade had been vastly expanded, notices the same phenomenon almost in the same terms.
[22] 'The best raw material.' Some people hold that the Romans and Italians were a cowardly nation. We doubt this on the whole. Physically, however, they were inferior to their neighbours. It is certain that the Transalpine Gauls were a conspicuously taller race. Cæsar says: 'Gallis, præ magnitudine corporum quorum, brevitas nostra contemptui est' ('Bell. Gall.' 2, 30 fin.); and the Germans, in a still higher degree, were both larger men and every way more powerful. The kites, says Juvenal, had never feasted on carcases so huge as those of the Cimbri and Teutones. But this physical superiority, though great for special purposes, was not such absolutely. For the more general uses of the legionary soldier, for marching, for castrametation, and the daily labours of the spade or mattock, a lighter build was better. As to single combats, it was one effect from the Roman (as from every good) discipline—that it diminished the openings for such showy but perilous modes of contest.
[23] 'Any considerable portion of this provincial corn growth,' i.e., of the provincial culture which was pursued on account of Rome, meaning not the government of Rome, but, in a rigorous sense, on account of Rome the city. For here lies a great oversight of historians and economists. Because Rome, with a view to her own privileged population, i.e., the urban population of Rome, the metropolis, in order that she might support her public distributions of grain, almost of necessity depended on foreign supplies, we are not to suppose that the great mass of Italian towns and municipia did so. Maritime towns, having the benefit of ports or of convenient access, undoubtedly were participators in the Roman advantage. But inland towns would in those days have forfeited the whole difference between foreign and domestic grain by the enormous cost of inland carriage. Of canals there was but one; the rivers were not generally navigable, and ports as well as river shipping were wanting.