seat of political transactions. In the little republic of which
Dante was a member the state of things was very different. These
small communities are most unmercifully abused by most of our
modern professors of the science of government. In such states,
they tell us, factions are always most violent: where both
parties are cooped up within a narrow space, political difference
necessarily produces personal malignity. Every man must be a
soldier; every moment may produce a war. No citizen can lie down
secure that he shall not be roused by the alarum-bell, to repel
or avenge an injury. In such petty quarrels Greece squandered
the blood which might have purchased for her the permanent empire
of the world, and Italy wasted the energy and the abilities which
would have enabled her to defend her independence against the
Pontiffs and the Caesars.

All this is true: yet there is still a compensation. Mankind has
not derived so much benefit from the empire of Rome as from the
city of Athens, nor from the kingdom of France as from the city
of Florence. The violence of party feeling may be an evil; but
it calls forth that activity of mind which in some states of
society it is desirable to produce at any expense. Universal
soldiership may be an evil; but where every man is a soldier
there will be no standing army. And is it no evil that one man
in every fifty should be bred to the trade of slaughter; should
live only by destroying and by exposing himself to be destroyed;
should fight without enthusiasm and conquer without glory; be
sent to a hospital when wounded, and rot on a dunghill when old?
Such, over more than two-thirds of Europe, is the fate of
soldiers. It was something that the citizen of Milan or Florence
fought, not merely in the vague and rhetorical sense in which the