Let the reader imagine an ill-kept domain overrun by a lot of stray curs that might prove dangerous: they are enticed and caught; a collar, with a chain attached to it, is put on their necks and they become good watch-dogs. - In the second place, this institution preserved to the subject the first and most precious of all liberties, the full possession and the unrestricted management of one's own person, the complete mastery of body and being. This was assured to him, guaranteed to him against the encroachments of the State. It was better guaranteed than by the wisest constitution, for the institution was a recognized custom accepted by everybody. In other words, it was a tacit, immemorial convention,[59] between the subject and the State, proclaiming that, if the State had a right to draw on purses it had no right to draft persons: in reality and in fact, the King, in his principal function, was merely a contractor like any other; he undertook natural defense and public security the same as others undertook cleaning the streets or the maintenance of a dike. It was his business to hire military workmen as they hired their civil workmen, by mutual agreement, at an understood price and at current market rates. Accordingly, the sub-contractors with whom he treated, the colonel and captains of each regiment, were subject as he was to the law of supply and demand; he allowed them so much for each recruit,[60] to replace those dropped out, and they agreed to keep their companies full. They were obliged to procure men at their own risk and at their own expense, while the recruiting-agent whom they dispatched with a bag of money among the taverns, enlisted artillerymen, horsemen or foot-soldiers, after bargaining with them, the same as one would hire men to sweep or pave the street and to clean the sewers.
Against this practice and this principle comes the theory of the Contrat-Social. It declares that the people are sovereign. Now, in this divided Europe, where a conflict between rival States is always imminent, sovereigns are military men; they are such by birth, education, and profession, and by necessity; the title carries along with it and involves the function. Consequently, the subject, in assuming their rights, imposes upon himself their duties; in his quota (of responsibility) he, in his turn, is sovereign; but, in his turn and in his person, he is a soldier.[61] Henceforth, if he is born an elector, he is born a conscript; he has contracted an obligation of a new species and of infinite reach; the State, which formerly had a claim only on his possessions, now has one on his entire body; never does a creditor let his claims rest and the State always finds reasons or pretexts to enforce its claims. Under the threats or trials of invasion the people, at first, had consented to pay this one; they regarded it as accidental and temporary. After victory and when peace came, its government continues to enforce the claim; it becomes settled and permanent. After the treaties of Luneville and Amiens, Napoleon maintains it in France; after the treaties of Paris and Vienna, the Prussian government is to maintain it in Prussia. One war after another and the institution becomes worse and worse; like a contagion, it has spread from State to State. At the present time, it has overspread the whole of continental Europe and here it reigns along with its natural companion which always precedes or follows it, its twin-brother, universal suffrage. Each more or less conspicuously "trotted out" and dragging the other along, more or less incomplete and disguised, both being the blind and formidable leaders or regulators of future history, one thrusting a ballot into the hands of every *****, and the other putting a soldier's knapsack on every *****'s back:
* with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the twentieth century, * with what exasperation of international rancor and distrust, * with what waste of human labor, * through what perversion of productive discoveries, * through what perfection of destructive appliances, * through what a recoil to the lower and most unwholesome forms of old militant societies, * through what retrograde steps towards brutal and selfish instincts, * towards the sentiments, habits and morality of the antique city and of the barbarous tribeis only too well known.[62] 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.