'But your new regular army,' I said, 'will be more formidable to the enemy than your present force.'
'I am not sure of that,' he answered. 'The merit of the French army was the impetuosity of its attack, the "furia Francese," as the Italians called it. Young troops have more of this quality than veterans. The Maison du Roi, whose charge at Steenkirk Macaulay has so well described, consisted of boys of eighteen.'
'I am re-editing,' I said, 'my old articles. Among them is one written in 1841 on the National Character of France, England, and America,[1] as displayed towards foreign nations. I have not much to change in what I have said of England or of America. As they have increased in strength they have both become still more arrogant, unjust, and shameless.
'England has perhaps become a little more prudent America a little less so. But France seems to me to be altered. I described her as a soldier with all the faults of that unsocial character. As ambitious, rapacious, eager for nothing but military glory and territorial aggrandisement. She seems now to have become moderate and pacific, and to be devoted rather to the arts of peace than to those of war.'
'France _is_ changed,' answered Tocqueville, 'and when compared with the France of Louis XIV., or of Napoleon, was already changed when you wrote, though the war-cry raised for political purposes in 1840 deceived you. At the same time, I will not deny that military glory would, more than any other merit, even _now_ strengthen a Government, and that military humiliation would inevitably destroy one. Nor must you overrate the unpopularity of the last war. Only a few even of the higher classes understood its motives. "Que diable veut cette guerre?" said my country neighbour to me; "si c'était contre les Anglais--mais _avec_ les Anglais, et pour le Grand Turc, qu'est-ce que cela peut signifier?" But when they saw that it cost only men, that they were not invaded or overtaxed, and that prices rose, they got reconciled to it.
'It was only the speculators of Paris that were tired of it. And if, instead of the Crimea, we had fought near our own frontiers, or for some visible purpose, all our military passions, bad and good, would have broken out.'