Reference has already been made to the reduction of the army after Waterloo. When warlike enthusiasm died out, and the cost of the war--some £800,000,000--had been grasped, the natural reaction came. Retrenchment “all along the line” was natural; but though the numbers were reduced to a weak peace footing, few regiments actually ceased to exist. The old 100th, 99th, 98th, 97th, 96th, 95th, and 94th Battalions were disbanded. Many regiments received fresh numbers. Hence the army in 1821 numbered 99,224 men, with 20,000 in India; but there was a slight increase to the infantry in 1823, when the 94th, 95th, 96th, 97th, 98th, and 99th reappear, and a further increase of 7,000 in 1831 because of Irish discontent; but this was again reduced, to be increased in 1848. In 1837 the army consisted of ninety-nine regiments of the line, with the Rifle Brigade, but was extremely weak in the matter of the artillery and cavalry. The dread of war died with the banishment of the great emperor to St. Helena, and was buried with his death. Europe was at peace for many a year, and people, foolish then as now, could not read by the lessons of the past that no perfect or continual peace was possible until the millennium came. Even those who looked forward to that event did not read prophecy correctly. There were to be “wars and rumours of wars,” but the people sat quietly down and dreamed of a continual peace, which was as impossible as a continual war. Exhaustion follows great warlike efforts, and exhaustion, of a different kind, follows prolonged peace. There is “a deal of human nature about man,” and there is at the bottom of most of us an old combative spirit that, however concealed by common conventional life, is none the less still smouldering below the surface, and quite ready to break out into a flame. The exhaustion of war requires repose: that of peace requires excitation, as the future proved. No war has ever been seriously unpopular in England--_after a long peace_. Man is a pugnacious animal at the heart of him, and woman is little better! The red coat, the “scarlet fever,” appeals to both sexes, and the most peace-loving woman in the world would rather see her brother or her lover die the death for country’s sake, than see him stay at home if his soldier’s work lay elsewhere.