a backward or prejudiced lot, not even knowing how to speak their language; they feel themselves superior, as formerly the señor soldado of the sixteenth century, or the civis romanus. Never since the great Spanish monarchy and the Old Roman empire has a conquering State and propagator of a new régime afforded its subjects such gratifications of self-esteem, nor opened so vast a career to their ambitions. For, having once adopted their career, they know better than the Spaniards under Charles V. or the Romans under Augustus, how far they can go and how fast they can get ahead. No obstacle impedes them; nobody feels himself confined his post; each considers the one he occupies as provisional, each takes it only to await a better one, anticipating another at a very early date; he dashes onward, springs aloft and occupies in advance the superior post which he means to secure on the first vacancy, and, under this Régime, the vacancies are numerous.--These vacancies, in the military service and in the grade of officers, may be estimated at nearly four thousand per annum;[3339] after 1808 and 1809, but especially after the disaster of 1812 and 1813, places are no longer lacking but subjects fill them; Napoleon is obliged to accept youths for officers as beardless as his conscripts, eighteen-year-old apprentices who, after a year or six months in the military academy, might finish their apprenticeship on the battle-field, pupils taken from the philosophy or rhetoric classes, willing children (de bonne volonté): On the 13th of December 1808, he draws 50 from his lycées, who don the gold-lace of under-officers at once; in 1809, he calls out 250, to serve in the depot battalions; in 1810, he calls out 150 of the age of nineteen who "know the drill," and who are to be sent on distant expeditions with the commission of second-lieutenant; in 1811, 400 for the school of noncommissioned officers at Fontainebleau, 20 for the Ile-de-Ré and 84 who are to be quartermasters; and, in 1812, 112 more and so on. Naturally, thanks to annually increasing gaps made by cannon and bayonet, the survivors in this body of youth mount the faster; in 1813 and 1814, there are colonels and lieutenant-colonels of the age of twenty-five.