In the beginning of these popular maladies, one may distinguish the sound from the sick; but when they come to continue, as ours have done, the whole body is then infected from head to foot; no part is free from corruption, for there is no air that men so greedily draw in that diffuses itself so soon and that penetrates so deep as that of licence.  Our armies only subsist and are kept together by the cement of foreigners; for of Frenchmen there is now no constant and regular army to be made.  What a shame it is! there is no longer any discipline but what we see in the mercenary soldiers.  As to ourselves, our conduct is at discretion, and that not of the chief, but every one at his own.  The general has a harder game to play within than he has without; he it is who has to follow, to court the soldiers, to give way to them; he alone has to obey:  all the rest if disolution and free licence.  It pleases me to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice, every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion.  Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.  We had ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to restore it: 

              “Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,
               Ne prohibete.”

["Forbid not, at least, that this young man repair this ruined age.” 
—­Virgil, Georg., i. 500.  Montaigne probably refers to Henry, king
of Navarre, afterwards Henry iv.]

What has become of the old precept, “That soldiers ought more to fear their chief than the enemy"?—­[Valerius Maximus, Ext. 2.]—­and of that wonderful example, that an orchard being enclosed within the precincts of a camp of the Roman army, was seen at their dislodgment the next day in the same condition, not an apple, though ripe and delicious, being pulled off, but all left to the possessor?  I could wish that our youth, instead of the time they spend in less fruitful travels and less honourable employments, would bestow one half of that time in being an eye-witness of naval exploits, under some good captain of Rhodes, and the other half in observing the discipline of the Turkish armies; for they have many differences and advantages over ours; one of these is, that our soldiers become more licentious in expeditions, theirs more temperate and circumspect; for the thefts and insolencies committed upon the common people, which are only punished with a cudgel in peace, are capital in war; for an egg taken by a Turkish soldier without paying for it, fifty blows with a stick is the fixed rate; for anything else, of what sort or how trivial soever, not necessary to nourishment, they are presently impaled or beheaded without mercy.  I am astonished, in the history of Selim, the most cruel conqueror that ever was, to see that when he subdued Egypt, the beautiful gardens about Damascus being all open, and in a conquered land, and his army encamped upon the very place, should be left untouched by the hands of the soldiers, by reason they had not received the signal of pillage.