TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 493
and King Frederick William I himself would no more have dreamed
than his son ever dreamed of attempting to impose military conscription
upon the Prussian bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the replacement of foreign
mercenary volunteer or conscript professional troops by native volunteer
or conscript professional troops, which had become the usual practice
of a Late Modern Western World by Frederick the Great's day, was the
prelude to the institution of compulsory universal service that was to be
inaugurated, six years after Frederick's death, in a French levee en masse;
and the raising of a native professional infantry, in imitation of, and
substitution for, the rare, prized, and therefore costly Swiss, had been
started by the Governments of contending Modern Western parochial
states during a general war of a.d. 1494-1525 that had been the first war
in the first war-and-peace cycle in the current Western series.
A sixteenth-century Austria who, like a sixteenth-century France,
had no martial native source to tap for the meeting of her requirements
in infantry,1 and whose Government's poverty made it impossible for it
to compete on equal terms with the French Government in the Swiss
mercenary market,2 had soon found a recruiting ground in adjoining
German lands—in Bavaria, in Swabia, in Alsace—for Landsknechts
who were passably good cheaper imitations of Swiss models;3 and in a
contemporary Spain the same necessitudinousness had been the mother
of the same invention. On a Castilian Plateau which, like the Swiss
highlands, was a predominantly pastoral country, the native herdsmen
offered better material for making soldiers than the husbandmen who
were numerically predominant in the populations of most sixteenth-
century West European countries.4 A Spanish 'gente armada y ordinada
a la suiza* is mentioned as early as the I3th April, 1504, in correspon-
dence between Their Catholic Majesties and the gran capitdn Gonzalo
de Cdrdoba;5 by about the year a.d. 1520, this new-model Spanish
infantry had made its debut in the field of Western warfare;6 and a
Spanish copy had proved itself more versatile than its Swiss original in,
for example, its capacity to storm fortresses besides fighting pitched
battles.7 A partial and gradual militarization of the population of Western
Christendom, which had thus begun soon after the opening of the six-
teenth century of the Christian Era with these German and Spanish
national imitations of a Swiss model, had been the prelude to the whole-
sale militarization which had been inaugurated, some three hundred
years later, in the French levee en masse of a.d. 1792.8
Napoleon's intemperately aggressive abuse of this newly forged French
weapon had provoked a more thorough-going adoption and more
efficient organization of compulsory universal military service in a.d.
1807-13 in an only temporarily crushed and humiliated Prussia; and
legislation of the day» which was the reflection of an oligarchic regime, had the effect of
driving into the ranks of 'the criminal classes', and from these into the ranks of the
armed forces, categories of offenders who might have been saved for Society if they
could have had the benefit of the more humane Western legislation in force mid-way
through the twentieth century.	* See Fueter, op. cit., p. 120.
2 See ibid., p. to.	3 See ibid., p. 120.	* See ibid., p. 37.
s See ibid., p. 93.	6 See ibid., p. 91.	7 See ibid., p. 92.
8 The tragically crucial importance of this revolutionary French step has been, noticed
in IV. iv. 150—1.