nations, having time to think, are likely to be more shrewd in
policy, and more crafty in strategy.

No doubt this momentary gain is bought at a ruinous after-cost. When
other sources of leisure become possible, the one use of slavery is
past. But all its evils remain, and even grow worse. 'Retail'
slavery--the slavery in which a master owns a few slaves, whom he
well knows and daily sees--is not at all an intolerable state; the
slaves of Abraham had no doubt a fair life, as things went in that
day. But wholesale slavery, where men are but one of the investments
of large capital, and where a great owner, so far from knowing each
slave, can hardly tell how many gangs of them he works, is an
abominable state. This is the slavery which has made the name
revolting to the best minds, and has nearly rooted the thing out of
the best of the world. There is no out-of-the-way marvel in this.
The whole history of civilisation, is strewn with creeds and
institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had
not been the late poison. A full examination of these provisional
institutions would need half a volume, and would be out of place and
useless here. Venerable oligarchy, august monarchy, are two that
would alone need large chapters. But the sole point here necessary
is to say that such preliminary forms and feelings at first often
bring many graces and many refinements, and often tend to secure
them by the preservative military virtue. There are cases in which
some step in INTELLECTUAL progress gives an early society some gain
in war; more obvious cases are when some kind of MORAL quality gives
some such gain. War both needs and generates certain virtues; not
the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as
valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline.