Note 12 — BELISARIUS,—WAS HE BLIND?

A good soldier can only be formed from men between eighteen and forty years of age. In ancient times it required more strength to make a soldier than in modern. The demand for such men, in an improving state of society, makes them too valuable to be expended on the game of war, and hence despots in civilised ages are compelled to use an inferior class. Good troops must always be highly paid. A good heavy-armed soldier, in ancient Greece, had half the pay of his captain. The pay of the celebrated English archers, in the middle ages, was extremely high; as it required the service of a brave and vigorous yeomanry to give that corps the efficiency it displayed in so many hard-fought battles—(Hallam's Constitutional History of England, ch. ix. vol. 2.) Lord Brougham, however, overrates the pay of a mounted archer, in making it "equal to thirty shillings of our money" a-day.—(Political Philosophy, part iii. p. 237.)