Originally, therefore, the paid army of England, as opposed to the militia, implied the introduction of a strictly mercenary force consisting indifferently of natives or foreigners, into our military system. But clearly there was no moral difference between the two classes of mercenaries so engaged. The hire, and not the cause, being the main consideration of both, the Englishman and the Brabançon were equally mercenaries in the ordinary acceptation of the term. The prejudice against mercenaries either goes too far or not far enough. If a Swiss or an Italian hiring himself to fight for a cause about which he was ignorant or indifferent was a mercenary soldier, so was an Englishman who with equal ignorance and indifference accepted the wages offered him by a military contractor of his own nation. Either the conduct of the Swiss was blameless, or the Englishman’s moral delinquency was the same as his. The public opinion of former times regarded both, of course, as equally blameless, or rather as equally meritorious. And it is worth noticing that the word _mercenary_ was applied alike to the hired military servant of his own as of another country. Shakespeare, for instance, applies the term mercenary to the 1,600 Frenchmen of low degree slain at Agincourt, whom Monstrelet distinguishes from the 10,000 Frenchmen of position who lost their lives on that memorable day-- In this ten thousand they have lost, There are but sixteen hundred mercenaries. And even so late as 1756, the original signification of the word had so little changed, that in the great debate in the House of Lords on the Militia Bill of that year Lord Temple and several other orators spoke of the national standing army as an army of _mercenaries_, without making any distinction between the Englishmen and the Hessians who served in it.[323] The moral distinction that now prevails between the paid service of natives and of foreigners is, therefore, of comparatively recent origin. It was one of the features of the Reformation in Switzerland that its leaders insisted for the first time on a moral difference between Swiss soldiers who served their own country for pay, and those who with equal bravery and credit sold their strength to the service of the highest foreign bidder.