Recent events in France have proved how fatal it is to allow the army of a country to dabble in politics. The military code of honour is good enough for the battle-field, where all we need of men is the courage to fight well and the capacity to provoke and profit by the enemy’s blunders. When the battle is won, it would be a churlish people who would ask to peer too closely into the method of winning it. For this reason a licence is permitted to soldiers that could never be tolerated in civilians. But bring those same morals into civil existence, and you may judge of the results by an impartial study of the _Affaire Dreyfus_. Where the civilian, bred to allow the individual some rights, would hesitate, the spurred and sabred hero knows no fear. He is accustomed to the effacement of the individual, to the suppression of all personal rights, to an unmitigated harshness of rule, to the dictator’s unquestioned authority. The law has no terrors for him, for he possesses his own law, which is summary and implacable. All means which lead to the end he has in view are alike serviceable and honest, since he is bound to win, and, as a soldier, must make 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 their trials; but it is plain to the simplest intelligence that their time, for themselves and their country, would have been better employed at home than dodging and ducking from the furies of corporals or captains. Here are some impressions culled from a young soldier’s notes, sent to me by a scientific student, whose time was lamentably squandered in his year of futile service.