The contrast may be illustrated, though not so sharply as might be desirable, in the different temper shown by the British people in the Boer war on the one hand, as compared with the popularity of the French-Prussian war among the German people on the other hand. Both were aggressive wars, and both were substantially unprovoked. Diplomatically speaking, of course, sufficient provocation was found in either case, as how should it not? But in point of substantial provocation and of material inducement, both were about equally gratuitous. In either case the war could readily have been avoided without material detriment to the community and without perceptible lesion to the national honour. Both were "engineered" on grounds shamelessly manufactured _ad hoc_ by interested parties; in the one case by a coterie of dynastic statesmen, in the other by a junta of commercial adventurers and imperialistic politicians. In neither case had the people any interest of gain or loss in the quarrel, except as it became a question of national prestige. But both the German and the British community bore the burden and fought the campaign to a successful issue for those interested parties who had precipitated the quarrel. The British people at large, it is true, bore the burden; which comes near being all that can be said in the way of popular approval of this war, which political statesmen have since then rated as one of the most profitable enterprises in which the forces of the realm have been engaged. On the subject of this successful war the common man is still inclined to cover his uneasy sense of decency with a recital of extenuating circumstances. What parallels all this in the German case is an outbreak of patriotic abandon and an admirable spirit of unselfish sacrifice in furtherance of the dynastic prestige, an intoxication of patriotic blare culminating in the triumphant coronation at Versailles. Nor has the sober afterthought of the past forty-six years cast a perceptible shadow of doubt across the glorious memory of that patriotic debauch.