with respect to a few commercial subjects, mostly concerned only the interests of the treasury or of the government, not those of the people; at least ideas tended everywhere in that way. The cabinets, therefore, looked upon themselves as the owners and administrators of large estates, which they were continually seeking to increase without the tenants on these estates being particularly interested in this improvement. The people, therefore, who in the Tartar invasions were everything in war, who, in the old republics, and in the Middle Ages, (if we restrict the idea to those possessing the rights of citizens,) were of great consequence, were in the eighteenth century, absolutely nothing directly, having only still an indirect influence on the war through their virtues and faults.
In this manner, in proportion as the government separated itself from the people, and regarded itself as the state, war became more exclusively a business of the government, which it carried on by means of the money in its coffers and the idle vagabonds it could pick up in its own and neighbouring countries. The consequence of this was, that the means which the government could command had tolerably well defined limits, which could be mutually estimated, both as to their extent and duration; this robbed war of its most dangerous feature: namely the effort towards the extreme, and the hidden series of possibilities connected therewith.
The financial means, the contents of the treasury, the state of credit of the enemy, were approximately known as well as the size of his army. Any large increase of these at the outbreak of a war was impossible. Inasmuch as the limits of the enemy’s power could thus be judged of, a State felt tolerably secure from complete subjugation, and as the State was conscious at the same time of the limits of its own means, it saw itself restricted to a moderate aim. Protected from an extreme, there was no necessity to venture on an extreme. Necessity no longer giving an impulse in that direction, that impulse could only now be given by courage and ambition. But these found a powerful counterpoise in the