to hire military workmen as they hired their civil workmen, by mutual agreement, at an understood price and at current market rates. Accordingly, the sub-contractors with whom he treated, the colonel and captains of each regiment, were subject as he was to the law of supply and demand; he allowed them so much for each recruit,[3260] to replace those dropped out, and they agreed to keep their companies full. They were obliged to procure men at their own risk and at their own expense, while the recruiting-agent whom they dispatched with a bag of money among the taverns, enlisted artillerymen, horsemen or foot-soldiers, after bargaining with them, the same as one would hire men to sweep or pave the street and to clean the sewers. Against this practice and this principle comes the theory of the Contrat-Social. It declares that the people are sovereign. Now, in this divided Europe, where a conflict between rival States is always imminent, sovereigns are military men; they are such by birth, education, and profession, and by necessity; the title carries along with it and involves the function. Consequently, the subject, in assuming their rights, imposes upon himself their duties; in his quota (of responsibility) he, in his turn, is sovereign; but, in his turn and in his person, he is a soldier.[3261] Henceforth, if he is born an elector, he is born a conscript; he has contracted an obligation of a new species and of infinite reach; the State, which formerly had a claim only on his possessions, now has one on his entire body; never does a creditor let his claims rest and the State always finds reasons or pretexts to enforce its claims. Under the threats or trials of invasion the people, at first, had consented to pay this one; they regarded it as accidental and temporary. After victory and when peace came, its government continues to enforce the claim; it becomes settled and permanent. After the treaties of Luneville and Amiens, Napoleon maintains it in France; after the treaties of Paris and Vienna, the Prussian government is to maintain it in Prussia. One war after another and the institution becomes worse and worse; like a contagion, it has spread from State to State. At the present time, it has overspread the whole of continental Europe and here it reigns along with its natural companion which always precedes or follows it, its twin-brother, universal suffrage. Each more or less conspicuously "trotted out" and dragging the other along, more or less incomplete and disguised, both being the blind and formidable leaders or regulators of future history, one thrusting a ballot into the hands of every adult, and the other putting a soldier's knapsack on every adult's back: * with what promises of massacre and bankruptcy for the twentieth century, * with what exasperation of international rancor and distrust, * with what waste of human labor, * through what perversion of productive discoveries, * through what perfection of destructive appliances,