Accordingly, it is the rich or well-to-do class, in other words the more or less cultivated class, which buys off its sons: reliance may be placed on their giving them more or less complete culture. In this way, it prevents the State from mowing down all its sprouting wheat and preserves a nursery of subjects among which society is to find its future élite.--Thus attenuated, the military law is still rigid enough: nevertheless it remains endurable. It is only towards 1807[3274] that it becomes monstrous and grows worse and worse from year to year until it becomes the sepulcher of all French youth, even to taking as canon fodder the adolescent under age and men already exempt or free by purchase. But, as before these excesses, it may still be maintained with certain modifications; it suffices almost to retouch it, to establish exemptions and the privilege of substitution as rights, which were once simply favors,[3275] reduce the annual contingent, limit the term of service, guarantee their lasting freedom to those liberated, and thus secure in 1818 a recruiting law satisfactory and efficacious which, for more than half a century, will attain its ends without being too detrimental or too odious, and which, among so many laws of the same sort, all mischievous, is perhaps the least pernicious. ***** [Footnote 3201: "The Ancient Régime," book II., ch. 2, 3, 4, and book V. (Laff. I. pp. 95 to 125 and pp. 245 to 308.)] [Footnote 3202: La Bruyère is, I believe, the first of these precursors. Cf. his chapters on "The Great," on "Personal Merit," on "The Sovereign and the Republic," and his chapter on "Man," his passages on "The Peasants," on "Provincial Notes," etc. These appeals, later on, excite the applause given to the "Marriage of Figaro." But, in the anticipatory indictment, they strike deeper; there is no gayety in them, the dominant sentiment being one of sadness, resignation, and bitterness.]