intelligent soldier over thirty is very rare to find, however bright and pleasant young officers may sometimes be. As for the military ideal of honour, that is hardly a thing to speak of with patience.
Recent events in France have proved how fatal it is to allow the army of a country to dabble in politics. The military code of honour is good enough for the battle-field, where all we need of men is the courage to fight well and the capacity to provoke and profit by the enemy's blunders. When the battle is won, it would be a churlish people who would ask to peer too closely into the method of winning it. For this reason a licence is permitted to soldiers that could never be tolerated in civilians. But bring those same morals into civil existence, and you may judge of the results by an impartial study of the Affaire Dreyfus. Where the civilian, bred to allow the individual some rights, would hesitate, the spurred and sabred hero knows no fear. He is accustomed to the effacement of the individual, to the suppression of all personal rights, to an unmitigated harshness of rule, to the dictator's unquestioned authority. The law has no terrors for him, for he possesses his own law, which is summary and implacable. All means which lead to the end he has in view are alike serviceable and honest, since he is bound to win, and, as a soldier, must make
