"Who can despair of Governments that passes a Soldier's Guard-house, or meets a red-coated man on the streets? That a body of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade them: this, a priori, does it not seem one of the impossiblest things? Yet look, behold it: in the stolidest of Do-nothing Governments, that impossibility is a thing done."--(Carlyle, "Past and Present," page 223.) "Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection; this of successfully killing one another? Truly, you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding, and regimenting you can make of men. These thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat; and are, for your behoof a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity. Few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came, by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm, combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse Guards and our United Service clubs. I could conceive an Emigration Service, a Teaching Service, considerable varieties of United and Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as this Fighting Service is; all doing their work like it--which work, much more than fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these new ages we are got into! Much lies among us, convulsively, nigh desperately, struggling to be born."--("Past and Present," page 224.) "It was well, all this, we know; and yet it was not well. Forty soldiers, I am told, will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob; forty to ten thousand, that is the proportion between drilled and undrilled. Much there is which cannot yet be organised in this world, but somewhat also which can--somewhat also which must. When one thinks, for example, what books are become and becoming for us, what operative Lancashires are become; what a Fourth Estate and innumerable virtualities not yet got to be actualities are become and becoming, one sees organisms enough in the dim huge future, and 'United Services' quite other than the redcoat one; and much, even in these years, struggling to be born!"--("Past and Present," page 226.)