In the first place, the expenditure in men. From 1791 to 1814 France alone, striving against Europe, coalesced by England,--France constrained and compelled, expended in butcheries for military glory (and also, let us add, for the defence of territory) five millions of men; that is to say, six hundred men per day. Europe, including the total of France, has expended sixteen millions six hundred thousand men; that is to say, two thousand deaths per day during twenty-three years. Secondly, the expenditure of money. We have, unfortunately, no authentic total, save the total of England. From 1791 to 1814 England, in order to make France succumb to Europe, became indebted to the extent of eighty-one millions, two hundred and sixty five thousand, eight hundred and forty-two pounds sterling. Divide this total by the total of men killed, at the rate of two thousand per day for twenty-three years, and you arrive at this result,--that each corpse stretched on the field of battle has cost England alone fifty pounds sterling. Add the total of Europe,--total unknown, but enormous. With these seventeen millions of dead men, they might have peopled Australia with Europeans. With the eighty millions expended by England in cannon-shots, they might have changed the face of the earth, begun the work of civilization everywhere, and suppressed throughout the entire world ignorance and misery. England pays eighty millions for the two statues of Pitt and Wellington. It is a fine thing to have heroes, but it is an expensive luxury. Poets cost less. CHAPTER II. The discharge of the warrior is signed: it is splendour in the distance. The great Nimrod, the great Cyrus, the great Sennacherib, the great Sesostris, the great Alexander, the great Pyrrhus, the great Hannibal, the great Cæsar, the great Timour, the great Louis, the great Frederic, and more great ones,--all are going away. It would be a mistake to think that we reject these men purely and simply. In our eyes five or six of those that we have named are legitimately illustrious; they have even mingled something good in their ravages; their definitive total embarrasses the absolute equity of the thinker, and they weigh nearly even weights in the balance of the injurious and the useful. Others have been only injurious. They are numerous, innumerable even; for the masters of the world are a crowd. The thinker is the weigher. Clemency suits him. Let us therefore say. Those others who have done only evil have one attenuating circumstance,--imbecility. They have another excuse yet,--the mental condition of the human race itself at the moment they appeared; the medium surrounding facts, modifiable, but encumbering.