It is strange that our historians have for the most part taken leave of the New Model without a tinge of regret, without estimation of its merits or enumeration of its services. Mountains of eulogy have been heaped on the Long Parliament, but little has been spared for this famous Army; nay, even military historians by a strange perversity begin the history of the Army not from its foundation but from its dissolution. Much doubtless besides the creation of a standing Army dates from the great rebellion, though few things more important in our history, unless indeed it be the cant that denies its importance. The bare thought of militarism or the military spirit is supposed to be unendurable to Englishmen. As if a nation had ever risen to great empire that did not possess the military spirit, and as if England herself had not won her vast dominions by the sword. We are accustomed to speak of our rule as an earnest for the eternal furtherance of civilisation; but we try to conceal the fact that the first step to empire is conquest. It is because we are a fighting people that we have risen to greatness, and it is as a fighting people that we stand or fall. Arms rule the world; and war, the supreme test of moral and physical greatness, remains eternally the touchstone of nations. Surely therefore the revival of the military spirit, and on the whole the grandest manifestation of the same in English history, are not matters to be lightly overlooked. The campaigns of the Plantagenets had shown how deep was the instinct of pugnacity that underlay the stolid English calm, but since the accession of the Tudors no sovereign had given it an outlet ashore in any great national enterprise. Elizabeth never truly threw in her lot with the revolted Netherlands; James hated a soldier, and shrank back in terror from the idea of throwing the English sword into the scale of the Thirty Years' War; Charles's miserable trifling with warfare contributed not a little to the unpopularity which caused his downfall. The English were compelled to sate their military appetite in the service of foreign countries, and as fractions of foreign armies.