short work of all obstacles in his path. And so, when he drifts into politics, liberty, life, honour, justice are words he recognises not. He is apt to treat his opponents as the enemy, to be circumvented at all costs, and into politics he carries the nefarious theory that all is fair in war. Unhappily, France for the tristful hour shares his belief. If militarism were not the execrable plague it is, such a lamentable state of things could never have been brought about amongst a fairly sane and intelligent people. Nowhere will you find a higher ideal of justice, of honour, of delicate and noble sentiment, than in France among the elect. This fact alone proves the French capable of every generous feeling, which we may be sure militarism will tend to destroy.
One of the worst things about the French army is, undoubtedly, conscription. Who is to measure the amount of evil done to the country by taking young men of twenty-one away from the work which is to make them independent citizens—to the commerce, the tillage, the liberal professions of a land where everything must stand still while its youth learns enough of soldiering to detest it, as a rule, without any serious profit to the army? I have gathered many impressions of barrack-life from Frenchmen and have never found that they were imbued with an excessive admiration of it. The good-humoured and indifferent make a joke of
