Nor is this guaranty otherwise than practical in every respect, and the more it is examined the more will its inestimable advantage be apparent. 1. There is, first, its most obvious _economy_, which is so glaring, that, according to a familiar French expression, “it leaps into the eyes.” Undertaking even briefly to set it forth, I seem to follow the proverb and “show the sun with a lantern.” According to the “Almanach de Gotha,” the appropriations for the army of France, during the year of peace before the war, were 588,852,970 francs,[216]--or about one hundred and seventeen millions of dollars. Give up the Standing Army and this considerable sum disappears from the annual budget. But this retrenchment represents only partially the prodigious economy. Beyond the annual outlay is the loss to the nation by the change of producers into non-producers. Admitting that in France the average annual production of a soldier usefully employed would be only fifty dollars, and multiplying this small allowance by the numbers of the Standing Army, you have another amount to be piled upon the military appropriations. Is it too much to expect that this surpassing waste shall be stopped? Must the extravagance born of war, and nursed by long tradition, continue to drain the resources of the land? Where is reason? Where humanity? A decree abolishing the Standing Army would be better for the French people, and more productive, than the richest gold-mine discovered in every department of France. Nor can imagination picture the fruitful result. I speak now only in the light of economy. Relieved from intolerable burden, industry would lift itself to unimagined labors, and society be quickened anew.