[Sidenote: Rarity of Warlike Enthusiasm in France.] [Sidenote: Tonquin.] [Sidenote: Egypt.] In the first place, Did the men who decided upon former wars _risk their own lives_? When a cabinet of civilians declares war, or when it is declared by a king who is not really a soldier, the act is not one of courage at all, but of political wisdom or folly. Or if a military king with a standing army declares war, the act is not one of national courage; it is only a demonstration of the military caste. When the nation itself is the army, and when it declares war through its freely-elected representatives, then the act is one of national courage; but how often has a war been declared in that way? Nations do not desire war, and the better they are educated the less they wish for it. The only French war in our time which really excited the enthusiasm of the nation was that for the liberation of Italy. The French had no enthusiasm whatever for the Crimean War, which they looked upon as an English enterprise; they had none for the Mexican, and there was only a little noisy surface excitement in favour of the war of 1870. Since then the nation has really had the control of its own affairs, and has shown no warlike tendencies. The Tonquin enterprise was ministerial, and ruined the minister who undertook it. The French people would not even support a vigorous Egyptian policy. Its only national courage is that which takes the form of waiting calmly for the German onslaught. [Sidenote: Turning against Weak Peoples.] Neither England nor France now ventures to attack a really first-class Power; but they exercise their military strength against weak, half-civilised peoples. England breaks the Zulu power, but not the Russian. France advances her African frontier, but not her European. France now exactly imitates the English policy of expansion out of Europe, and of doing nothing in Europe until she can find an ally. [Sidenote: France and England now Second-class Powers.] They are still nominally Great Powers, but they now belong in reality to a second class which might be defined as that of the nations that do not fight without allies except against feeble potentates. Neither one nor the other preserves those illusions about its own strength which are necessary for heroic action. What is more, the other nations have lost the old fear of England and France, whose mutual distrust breaks forth on every possible occasion and deprives them of the one source of real strength--association. [Sidenote: The Siege of Paris.]