of the mass of the people: they soon returned to it again: and
the character which was habitual prevailed over that which was
occasional. A campaign of forty days was too short, the
discipline of a national militia too lax, to efface from their
minds the feelings of civil life. As they carried to the camp the
sentiments and interests of the farm and the shop, so they
carried back to the farm and the shop the military
accomplishments which they had acquired in the camp. At home the
soldier learned how to value his rights, abroad how to defend
them.

Such a military force as this was a far stronger restraint on the
regal power than any legislative assembly. The army, now the most
formidable instrument of the executive power, was then the most
formidable check on that power. Resistance to an established,
government, in modern times so difficult and perilous an
enterprise, was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the
simplest and easiest matter in the world. Indeed, it was far too
simple and easy. An insurrection was got up then almost as easily
as a petition is got up now. In a popular cause, or even in an
unpopular cause favoured by a few great nobles, a force of ten
thousand armed men was raised in a week. If the King were, like
our Edward the Second and Richard the Second, generally odious,
he could not procure a single bow or halbert. He fell at once and
without an effort. In such times a sovereign like Louis the
Fifteenth or the Emperor Paul would have been pulled down before
his misgovernment had lasted for a month. We find that all the
fame and influence of our Edward the Third could not save his
Madame de Pompadour from the effects of the public hatred.