493 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
armies as profit-earning establishments to be hired at auction to the
highest bidder.1

The Spanish light cavalry (gimtes)? French heavy cavalry (gendar-
merie}, and Gascon infantry were thus the only land-troops of any account
in the Western World at the opening of the series of Modern and post-
Modern Western war-and-peace cycles that sought service with their
own national governments; and they too, like their Swiss contemporaries
who sold their services abroad, were moved by mercenary motives as
well as by a zest for bearing arms. In contrast to the spirit of the Govern-
ments of the Early Modern Western parochial states, which already
delighted in war as ardently as any of their successors, a great majority
of the population of Western Christendom was thus at this date still
unmilitarized. While they were already being victimized by their rulers'
warlike propensities, they had not yet become their rulers' accomplices
in the public crime of making war for the love of it.

This initial unmilitary-mindedness of the peasantry and bourgeoisie
of Modem Western Christendom is perhaps one explanation of the long
survival there of the practice of treating military service as a professional
career for 'expendable' foreign mercenaries rather than as a patriotic
duty for respectable citizens. Scottish and Irish mercenaries were still
employed, side by side with Swedish national forces, by Gustavus
Adolphus in the Thirty Years War (gerebatur A.D. 1618-48), and Ger-
man mercenaries by the Dutch and Venetian Governments in the
Western General War of A.D. 1672-1713 and in the Veneto-Ottoman
War of 1683-1715. The British Government employed hired Hessian
conscripts as well as voluntarily enlisted native British professional
troops in North America in its war with the insurgent people of the
British colonies there in A.D. 1775-83; and as late as the time of the
Crimean War (gerebatur A.D. 1854-6) it raised a foreign legion of German,
Swiss, and Italian mercenaries amounting to nearly thirteen thousand
men, all told.3

Even after the hired foreign mercenary had been superseded by the
native professional soldier as the typical man-at-arms on Western parade-
grounds, so ardent a militarist as Frederick the Great had reversed, as
we have noticed already in another context,4 his father's imprudent step
of conscripting Prussian artisans as well as Prussian agricultural serfs;5

1 The Rivieran principality of Monaco engaged in the corresponding state enterprise
of maintaining a navy for hire (see Fueter, op. cit., p. 231) b efore it went in for the still more
profitable public business of turning a sovereign independent city-state into an inter-
national gambling resort. 2 See ibid., p. 19.

3 See Fortescue, J. W.: A History of the British Army, vol. xiii (London 1930, Mac-
millan), p. 227. When the •writer of this Study -was a child, he once met an old lady who
told him that, in her own childhood, she had seen, encamped on the South Downs, the
German mercenaries who, as she put it, had been hired to garrison Great Britain while
the bulk of the small native British professional army of the day was on active service
overseas. By the time of writing in A.D. 1951, the writer could not recollect his informant's
identity, but the memory of what she had told him some fifty years or more ago was clear
enough to send him in search of verification of it, The passage, cited in this footnote, of
Forteseue's classical work shows that, out of close upon 10,000 German and Swiss mer-
cenaries assembled in Great Britain from May 1855 onwards, about 6,000 were in fact
retained there, -while nearly 4,000 were sent to the seat of war.

* In IV. iv. 145-6.

5 In an eighteenth-century Western World a selective conscription of the peasantry
had been supplemented by the conscription of convicts and other 'social misfits'. The