comrade that he wanted to put his hand through the sleeve (the channel, in French, _la manche_), and shake hands cordially with him. Alas! it is her sword that bellicose France wishes to put through the sleeve, if we are to believe the Nationalists, and slay perfidious Albion. It is, perhaps, an exaggeration to describe barracks, as M. Urbain Gohier does, as “the school of all crapulous vices: idleness, lying, debauchery, drunkenness, obscenity, and moral cowardice.” But there is much truth in his contrasting statement, that “the surprising vitality and progress in every way of the Anglo-Saxon races are due to the fact that these latter escape the corrupting and degrading influence of the barracks.” In war men may herd together and be the better for it, since they suffer and bear privation together. But in peace it is impossible that general life of this comfortless kind can have any but a disastrous action upon character. The twenty-eight days of the reservists may be an excellent farce, if the discomforts and trials are borne with high spirits and a sense of fun. From this point of view it is easy enough to laugh at such amusing plays as _Champignol Malgré Lui_, and the coarse and witty comedies of Courteline, whose military studies are steeped in a good-humoured but terrible realism. You must laugh at that brutal but brilliant little piece, _Lidoire_, capitally acted at Antoine’s, even while you are filled with an unutterable sense of sadness in contemplation of the futile suffering of barrack-life. Why should grown men, under pretext that their country may some day be attacked, be submitted to the disennobling trials of the general dormitory, to the annihilating process of inflexible and petty discipline, at the mercy of the temper and caprices of superiors? The audience at Antoine’s shout with laughter when the sober fellow is brutalised for his drunken comrade, whom he is trying to shield, but the thinking spectator is saddened by the realistic travesty of justice so peculiar to-day in militarist France. One applauds the more the magnificent outburst against the army in that remarkable play of MM. Donnay and Descaves, _La Clairière_, where the tortured workman shouts, “There is no such thing as an intelligent bayonet.” Think, then, what it must mean for the young fellow dragged reluctantly from his chosen work, to waste three years fretting in servitude that does his country no good, to share the common life of men more often than not repulsive to him. In the case of the poor it is far worse, for they have no means of avoiding the obligatory three years’ service; and if you would have some idea of the corrupting influence of this experience on a farmer’s son, read M. René Bazin’s charming story, _La Terre qui Meurt_, where the young soldier back from Africa has acquired such habits of idleness, of café loungings, of little glasses, and martial vanity that his downward career is traced out