movement will be made by men who have the knowledge and experience of military life. A great military Power continually augmenting its army in hopes of repressing anarchy presents a spectacle much like that which may be seen at a Spanish bullfight when the banderilla has been planted by a skilful hand, and when every bound by which the infuriated animal seeks to shake off the barb that is lacerating its flesh only deepens and exasperates the wound.

No reasonable man will deny that a period of steady discipline is, to many characters, an education of great value-an education producing results that are not likely in any other way to be equally attained. It is especially useful in communities that are still in a low stage of civilisation, and have not yet attained the habits of order and respect for authority, and in communities that are deeply divided by sectional and provincial antipathies. It is, I think, equally true that improvements have been introduced into modern armies which have greatly raised their moral tone. But, when all this is admitted, the shadows of the picture remain very marked. Deferred marriage, the loosening of domestic ties, the growth of ideals in which bloodshed and violence play a great part, a diminished horror of war, the constant employment of the best human ingenuity in devising new and more deadly instruments of destruction-all these things follow in the train of the great armies. It is impossible to turn Europe into a camp without in some degree reviving the ideals and the standards of a military age.

Discipline teaches much, but it also represses much, and the dead-level and passive obedience of the military system are not the best school of independent thought and individual energy. To the finer and more delicate flowers of human culture it is peculiarly pre

judicial. Strongly marked individual types, highly strung, sensitive, nervous organisations, are the soils from which much that is most beautiful in our civilisation has sprung. Beyond all other things, enforced military service tends to sterilise them. Among such men it is difficult to overestimate either the waste and ruin of high talent, or the amount of acute and useless suffering that it produces. To democracies these things are of little moment, and they seem lost in the splendour and pageantry of military life. But the statistics that are occasionally published, exhibiting the immensely disproportionate number of suicides in some of the chief armies of the Continent, show clearly the suffering that is festering beneath.

Taine has devoted to the growth of the military system several pages of admirable power and truth, and he justly describes conscription as the natural companion or brother of universal suffrage-one of the two great democratic forces which seem destined for some time to rule the world. The levelling and intermingling of classes it produces renders it congenial to a democratic age, and the old system of obtaining exemptions and substitutions for money has been generally abolished. In the majority of cases, those who desired exemption were men with no military aptitude, so the army probably gained by the substitution. It was a free contract, in which the poor man received what the rich man paid, and by which both parties were benefited. It gave, however, some privilege to wealth, and democracy, true to its genuine instinct of preferring equality to liberty, emphatically condemned it.

There is, however, another aspect of the question which has impressed serious observers on the Conti

1

Origines de la France Contemporaine: Le Régime Moderne, i. 284-96.

nent. In spite of the affinity I have mentioned, it would be hardly possible to conceive a greater contrast in spirit and tendency than exists in some essential respects between the highly democratic representative Governments and the universal military service, which are simultaneously flourishing in a great part of Europe. The one is a system in which all ideas of authority and subordination are discarded, in which the skilful talker or demagogue naturally rules, in which every question is decided by the votes of a majority, in which liberty is perpetually pushed to the borders of license. The other is a system of the strictest despotism and subordination, of passive obedience without discussion or remonstrance; a system with ideals, habits, and standards. of judgment utterly unlike those of popular politics; a system which is rapidly including, and moulding, and representing the whole adult male population. And while parliamentary government is everywhere showing signs of growing inefficiency and discredit, the armies of Europe are steadily strengthening, absorbing more and more the force and manhood of Christendom. Some observers are beginning to ask themselves whether these two things are likely always to go on together, and always to maintain their present relation-whether the eagles will always be governed by the parrots.

The great growth of militarism in the latter half of the nineteenth century has, I think, contributed largely, though indirectly, to the prevailing tendency to aggrandise the powers of government and to seek social reforms in strong, coercive organisations of society. It is also the chief source of the immense increase of taxation, which has so seriously aggravated the dangers of a period of democratic transformation. It is not, indeed, by any means the only source. Something is due to the higher wages, the better payment of func

tionaries and workmen of every order, which has followed in the train of a higher standard of life and comfort. This beneficent movement was much accentuated in a period of great prosperity, and it has continued with little abatement, though economical conditions have much changed.

A much more considerable cause, however, of the increase of national expenditure is to be found in the many new duties that are thrown upon the State. The most important of these has been that of national education. Hardly any change in our generation has been more marked than that which made the education of the poor one of the main functions of the Government. In 1833, a parliamentary grant of 20,000l. was, for the first time, made in England to assist two societies engaged in popular education. In 1838, the parliamentary grant was raised to 30,000l. a year. It soon passed these limits; but the great period of national expenditure on education is much more recent. Before the Act of 1870 the State, in encouraging primary education, confined itself to grants in aid of local and voluntary bodies. It built no schools, and it made no provision for education where local agencies were wanting. The Act of 1870, providing for the establishment of a school in every district where the supply of education was deficient; the Act of 1876, making it penal for parents to neglect the education of their children, and the Act of 1891, granting free education, were the chief causes of the rapid rise in this branch of expenditure. In 1892 the total expenditure of school boards in England and Wales amounted to the enormous sum of 7,134,3861. The number of free scholars was about 3,800,000, and the number of children paying fees or partial fees was about 1,020,000.1

See the statistics in Whitaker's Almanack for 1894, pp. 601, 605.

England has, in this respect, only acted on the same lines as other civilised countries. She has acted on the supposition that, in the competition of nations, no uneducated people can hold its own, either in industrial or political competitions, and that democratic government can only be tolerable when it rests on the broad basis of an educated people. Probably few persons will now altogether doubt these truths, though something of the old belief in the omnipotence of education may have passed away, and though some qualifying considerations may have come into sight. The old Tory doctrine, that national education may easily be carried to a point which unfits men for the manual toil in which the great majority must pass their lives, was certainly not without foundation. Formerly, the best workman was usually content to remain in his class, and to bring up his children in it. He took a pride in his work, and by doing so he greatly raised its standard and character. His first desire is now, much more frequently, to leave it, or at least to educate his children in the tastes and habits of a class which he considers a little higher than his own. That a man born in the humbler stages of society, who possesses the power of playing a considerable part in the world, should be helped to do so is very desirable; but it is by no means desirable that the flower of the working-class, or their children, should learn to despise manual labour and the simple, inexpensive habits of their parents, in order to become very commonplace doctors, attorneys, clerks, or newspaper writers. This is what is continually happening, and while it deprives the workingclasses of their best elements, it is one great cause of the exaggerated competition which now falls with crushing weight on the lower levels of the intellectual professions.