It proved advantageous and necessary not only to promote many excellent noncommissioned officers to officers' rank, but also frequently to extend the sphere for the replenishment of the officers' corps, in the case both of the regular army and the reserves, very considerably beyond the limits customary in time of peace. In doing this many prejudices were set aside, often with very beneficial results. At the same time it ought to be borne in mind that, in peace-time, no matter how insistently direct preparation for war is put in the first rank of importance, none the less all kinds of claims are made upon the officers which disappear in time of war, and therefore the choice of persons suitable for the position of officer is necessarily confined within narrower limits. We need not take into account here the question of pecuniary circumstances, but education, intellectual bias, and ambition do not suffice to render every individual fit for the position of officer. The spirit of German militarism, which has enabled us to stand the test of the World War, and which we must preserve in the future, because with it our world-position stands or falls,--which, moreover is: "every whit as monarchical as it is aristocratic and democratic,"--rests ultimately on the building up of an officers' corps which shall be thoroughly efficient for purposes of war. For this purpose a sound aristocratic tradition is of the highest value. This is in no way connected with so-called Junkerdom and caste-feeling. Even in the case of the army of the young North American Republic, Washington demanded that only "gentlemen" should be given a commission. Aristocratic tradition, in the wider sense, is of the utmost service in the training of personalities. No profession stands in greater need of the latter than that of the officer. The choice of the most suitable man can, however, only be satisfactorily accomplished by means of the gradual replenishment of the officers' corps, and not by the arbitrary placing of all on the same level. The warlike efficiency of the ruling class in Japan was essentially the result of the tradition which lived in the old Samurai families. Even the army of the first French Empire, in spite of the democratic notions which linked it with the time of the Republic, none the less did not lose all its connection with the army of the _ancien régime_. Napoleon made it his immediate endeavour to develop a new chivalry in his army, and to fill up the ranks of his officers from the families of the old nobility. In spite of the intense revolutionary and national feeling, republican tendencies alone could not have endowed the armies of the Revolution with the necessary stanchness. It was only the development of a military hierarchy and its consolidation in course of time, combined with the leadership of Napoleon and the great aims which he held up before his army, that raised the latter to supreme war-efficiency.