Still, however, in calculating all the chances attending the eventful game on which so much was to be staked, and to encounter such attempts upon France as England might, by his absence, be tempted to make, Napoleon judged it prudent to have recourse to additional means of national defence, which might extend the duty of military service still more widely among his subjects than was effected even by the conscription. As the measure was never but in one particular brought into general activity, it may be treated of the more slightly. The system consisted in a levy of national guards, divided into three general classes--the Ban, the Second Ban, and Arriere-Ban; for Buonaparte loved to retain the phrases of the old feudal institutions. The First Ban was to contain all men, from twenty to twenty-six years, who had not been called to serve in the army. The Second Ban included all capable of bearing arms, from the age of twenty-six to that of forty. The Arriere-Ban comprehended all able-bodied men from forty to sixty. The levies from these classes were not to be sent beyond the frontiers of France, and were to be called out in succession, as the danger pressed. They were divided into cohorts of 1120 men each. But it was the essential part of this project, that it placed one hundred cohorts of the First Ban--(that is, upwards of 100,000 men, between twenty and twenty-six years)--at the immediate disposal of the minister of war. In short, it was a new form of conscription, with the advantage, to the recruits, of limited service.