It is evident that in such a condition of affairs, the effect which the plague produced on civil society must have been different from that of former times. Pernicious influences which, during the middle ages, had endangered the health of the inhabitants of towns, and had often rendered disorders, naturally slight, in the highest degree malignant, were for ever removed. Under this head may be mentioned more particularly the ill-contrived construction of the houses and streets, which even yet, in large cities, destroys the comfort of the inhabitants of whole districts, and those not of the poorest class only. As people acquired confidence in the security of peace, it ceased to be necessary to protect every country town by fortifications. The walls were thrown down, the stagnant moats were filled up, and as people were no longer limited to a narrow space, they built more convenient houses in airy streets; the dark alleys and damp dwellings under ground were gradually abandoned, and a more comfortable mode of living superseded the former misery. By this means the mortality was considerably diminished, and the power of epidemics was checked; nor can it be doubted, that the better administration of the laws greatly obviated the dissolution of social ties in times of plague, and the effects of superstition and religious animosity, which had formerly been so frightful. These inestimable national improvements, however, took place but gradually, and were not a little retarded for a time by the new evil of the employment of mercenaries. For as the germs of vice were scattered in all directions by the wandering Lansquenets, so also the infection of noxious diseases found easier entrance into the towns and villages through the medium of this dissolute and widely spread class of men. The Lansquenets of the sixteenth century, as spreaders of contagion, supplied the place of the former Romish pilgrims and flagellants; they even proved a more permanent scourge than those wanderers of the middle ages, who only made their appearance on extraordinary occasions. We need here only call to mind the malignant and beyond measure noisome lues which at the end of the fifteenth century spread with the rapidity of lightning over all Europe. It was not an importation from the innocent inhabitants of the New World, nor was it bred by the ill-treated Marrani[406], the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. It was the mercenary army of Charles the VIIIth in Naples (1495), whose excesses gave to the already existing poison a malignity till then unknown, and prepared for the deeply rooted depravity, a scourge at which all the world shuddered with horror. It is, moreover, in place here to observe that, in the larger armies which the new military system now brought into the field, the ordinary camp diseases, to which another very fatal one was added[407], were of course much more extensively propagated than in the less numerous forces of