If any credit is to be given to the census, the increasing population of the United Kingdom, amounted at this period to nearly twenty millions: France reckoned but twenty-seven millions when Frederick the Great declared that if he were her king, “not a gun should be fired in Europe without his leave.” The French army was undoubtedly very formidable from numbers, discipline, skill, and bravery; but contrary to the general opinion, the British army was inferior to it in none of these points save the first, and in discipline it was superior, because a national army will always bear a sterner code than a mixed force will suffer. With the latter, the military not the moral crimes can be punished; men will submit to death for a breach of great regulations which they know by experience to be useful, but the constant restraint of petty though wholesome rules they will escape from by desertion, or resist by mutiny, when the ties of custom and country are removed; for the disgrace of bad conduct attaches not to them, but to the nation under whose colours they serve; great indeed is that genius that can keep men of different nations firm to their colours, and preserve a rigid discipline at the same time. Napoleon’s military system was, from this cause, inferior to the British, which, if it be purely administered, combines the solidity of the Germans with the rapidity of the French, excluding the mechanical dulness of the one, and the dangerous vivacity of the other; yet, before the campaign in the Peninsula had proved its excellence in every branch of war, the English army was absurdly under-rated in foreign countries, and absolutely despised in its own. It was reasonable to suppose that it did not possess that facility of moving in large bodies which long practice had given to the French; but the individual soldier was (and is still) most falsely stigmatized as deficient in intelligence and activity, the officers ridiculed, and the idea that a British could cope with a French army, even for a single campaign, considered chimerical.