’The new law of recruitment, however, may produce a great change.  Instead of 80,000 conscripts, 120,000 are to be taken each year.  This is about all that are fit for service.  They are required to serve for only two years.  If the change ended there our army would be still more a militia than it is now.  It would be the Prussian Landwehr.  But those entitled to their discharge are to be enticed by higher pay, promotions, bounties, and retiring pensions—­in short, by all means of seduction, to re-enter for long periods, for ten, or fifteen, or perhaps twenty years.  It is hoped that thus a permanent regular army may be formed, with an esprit de corps of its own, unsympathising with the people, and ready to keep it down; and such will, I believe, be the result.  But it will take nine or ten years to produce such an army—­and the dangers that I fear are immediate.’

‘What are the motives,’ I asked, ’for the changes as to the conscription, the increase of numbers, and the diminution of the time of service?’

‘They are parts,’ he answered, ’of the system.  The French peasant, and indeed the ouvrier, dislikes the service.  The proportion of conscripts who will re-enlist is small.  Therefore the whole number must be large.  The country must be bribed to submit to this by the shortness of the term.  The conscript army will be sacrificed to what is to be the regular army.  It will be young and ill-trained.’

‘But your new regular army,’ I said, ’will be more formidable to the enemy than your present force.’

‘I am not sure of that,’ he answered.  ’The merit of the French army was the impetuosity of its attack, the “furia Francese,” as the Italians called it.  Young troops have more of this quality than veterans.  The Maison du Roi, whose charge at Steenkirk Macaulay has so well described, consisted of boys of eighteen.’

‘I am re-editing,’ I said, ’my old articles.  Among them is one written in 1841 on the National Character of France, England, and America,[1] as displayed towards foreign nations.  I have not much to change in what I have said of England or of America.  As they have increased in strength they have both become still more arrogant, unjust, and shameless.

’England has perhaps become a little more prudent America a little less so.  But France seems to me to be altered.  I described her as a soldier with all the faults of that unsocial character.  As ambitious, rapacious, eager for nothing but military glory and territorial aggrandisement.  She seems now to have become moderate and pacific, and to be devoted rather to the arts of peace than to those of war.’