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 adult, and the other putting a soldier's knapsack on every adult'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 tribe is only too well known.[3262] 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.
Such is the terminal fruit of the new Regime; military duty is here the counterpart, and as it were, the ransom of political right; the modern citizen may balance one with the other like two weights in the scale.

On the one side, he may place his prerogative as sovereign, that is to say, in point of fact, the faculty every four years of giving one vote among ten thousand for the election or non-election of one deputy among six hundred and fifty; on the other side, he may place his positive, active service, three, four or five years of barrack life and of passive obedience, and then twenty-eight days more, then a thirteen-days' summons in honor of the flag, and, for twenty years, at each rumor of war, anxiously waiting for the word of command which obliges him to shoulder his gun and slay with his own hand, or be slain.

He will probably end by discovering that the two sides of the scales do not balance and that a right so hollow is poor compensation for so heavy a burden.
Of course, in 1789, he foresaw nothing like that; he was optimistic, pacific, liberal, humanitarian; he knew nothing of Europe nor of history, nothing of the past nor of the present.