A certain number of political students had come to the discouraging conclusion that discipline could not exist side by side with a pure democracy. The two things, they said, were incompatible. Trade Union leaders in England were for a long time apparently under the same illusion. Joffre, whom I have tried to show as the perfect democrat, will not accept any such view. In a frank and engaging mood of communicability, he explained to an American writer, Mr. Owen Johnson, who visited him at Headquarters, that democracy was by no means the uneasy bedfellow of discipline; the two could exist in the most perfect harmony. "Where a nation is truly Republican, I do not think there is any danger to the spirit of democracy in military preparation," said Joffre, in reply to the suggestions that the existence of a large army was a constant incitement to war, and opposed, therefore, to those pacific principles upon which a modern republic must be founded. Military discipline does not undermine democracy: that is his argument. "In a republic where the need of individual liberty is always strong, military service gives the citizen a quality of self-discipline which he needs, perhaps, to respect the rights of others, as well as to act in organised bodies." And then he added that if America—and the remark applies, of course, to England—dreaded military service, it was because the citizen had his eyes fixed on the German ideal rather than on the French. The distinction between the French Army and the German was a difference in the conception of the rôle of the soldier. The German system made a man into a machine. It was based on fear, and robbed him of his initiative. It explained the attack in close formation, the stupendous throwing away of life, and an officer class, a veritable Brahmin caste, that did not transmit orders directly, but through sergeants and corporals. The French spirit, on the other hand, implied fraternity. The officer was interested in the welfare of his men and regarded them as his children. Nothing was indifferent to him which affected them morally or materially. The German system was the revolver at the head, the French the word of encouragement, the smile, the _bonne camaraderie_.