Armies were supported out of the Treasury, which the sovereign regarded partly as his privy purse, at least as a resource belonging to the Government, and not to the people. Relations with other States, except with respect to a few commercial subjects, mostly concerned only the interests of the Treasury or of the Government, not those of the people; at least ideas tended everywhere in that way. The Cabinets therefore looked upon themselves as the owners and administrators of large estates, which they were continually seeking to increase, without the tenants on those estates being particularly interested in this improvement. The people, therefore, who in the Tartar invasions were everything in war, who in the old republics and in the Middle Ages were of great consequence, were in the eighteenth century absolutely nothing directly. In this manner, in proportion as the Government separated itself more from the people, and regarded itself as the State, war became more and more exclusively a business of the Government, which it carried on by means of the money in its coffers and the idle vagabonds it could pick up in its own and neighbouring countries. The army was a State property, very expensive, and not to be lightly risked in battle. "In its signification war was only diplomacy somewhat intensified, a more vigorous way of negotiating, in which battles and sieges were substituted for diplomatic notes." "Plundering and devastating the enemy's country were no longer in accordance with the spirit of the age." "They were justly looked upon as unnecessary barbarity." "War, therefore, confined itself more and more, both as regards means and ends, to the army itself. The army, with its fortresses and some prepared positions, constituted a State in a State, within which the element of war slowly consumed itself. All Europe rejoiced at its taking this direction, and held it to be the necessary consequence of the spirit of progress." So think many in this country to-day. They are only a hundred years behind the times.