to maintain the political equilibrium or defend the public interests,
should never occur again: otherwise, how could it be known when and how
to excite the people to a national war? For example, if one hundred
thousand Germans crossed the Rhine and entered France, originally with
the intention of preventing the conquest of Belgium by France, and
without any other ambitious project, would it be a case where the whole
population--men, women, and children--of Alsace, Lorraine, Champagne,
and Burgundy, should rush to arms? to make a Saragossa of every walled
town, to bring about, by way of reprisals, murder, pillage, and
incendiarism throughout the country? If all this be not done, and the
Germans, in consequence of some success, should occupy these provinces,
who can say that they might not afterward seek to appropriate a part of
them, even though at first they had never contemplated it? The
difficulty of answering these two questions would seem to argue in favor
of national wars. But is there no means of repelling such an invasion
without bringing about an uprising of the whole population and a war of
extermination? Is there no mean between these contests between the
people and the old regular method of war between permanent armies? Will
it not be sufficient, for the efficient defense of the country, to
organize a militia, or landwehr, which, uniformed and called by their
governments into service, would regulate the part the people should take
in the war, and place just limits to its barbarities?

I answer in the affirmative; and, applying this mixed system to the
cases stated above, I will guarantee that fifty thousand regular French
troops, supported by the National Guards of the East, would get the
better of this German army which had crossed the Vosges; for, reduced to
fifty thousand men by many detachments, upon nearing the Meuse or
arriving in Argonne it would have one hundred thousand men on its hands.
To attain this mean, we have laid it down as a necessity that good