The army and the navy are the great causes of expenditure in our days; but in the sixteenth century both were so insignificant that their burden was hardly appreciable. France has now about three-quarters of a million of men under arms, but in 1560 the army barely amounted to 20,000 men, and these were so scattered, and under so many local restrictions, that the crown could not collect 10,000 men without the aid of mercenaries. Although the main strength consisted in cavalry, the importance of infantry was beginning to be felt. They were long looked upon as a very inferior arm; indeed, the feeling is not yet extinct in some countries; but every improvement in fire-arms so increased the power of the foot-soldier, that far-sighted men began to see that the victory must ultimately remain with the general who could make the best use of his infantry. The artillery was rude and awkward; the guns were clumsily mounted, and the balls rarely fitted the barrel. With all these defects it must not excite surprise that on an average they could not be discharged more than once in five minutes. When fixed in battery, they might be trusted to breach the wall of a city or castle, where the object of the engineer seems to have been to expose as much as possible of his defenses to the fire of the enemy. The cannons were almost utterly useless in the field against a body of men in motion; but the noise they made proved at times as effectual in dispiriting the enemy as their accuracy of fire. The army was officered by the nobility: a commoner might rise to be a sergeant, but it was impossible for him to obtain a commission. It was partly on this ground of unpaid military service that the nobles claimed exemption from taxation. The French navy existed but in name. When Francis I. was at war with England he brought twenty-five galleys from the Mediterranean into the Channel, the Genoese lent him ten vessels, and with others in his harbors he mustered a fleet of one hundred and fifty ships of large tonnage, and sixty small ones. One great ship of a hundred guns, called the _Caracon_, had been built, but it never put to sea, being burned in harbor. We are all familiar with the uncouth yet strangely picturesque forms of those ships, standing high out of the water, with their castles at each end, and looking as if a breath of wind would blow them over. They were slow and bad sailers, deficient in accommodation for their two crews--the soldiers to fight and the seamen to sail them. The navy was not quite so exclusive and aristocratic as the army; but if seamen worked the ship, landsmen as captains and admirals commanded it, as they did, until comparatively a late period, in our own service.