One of the most interesting aspects of the state of war is that of its connection with fraud, deceit, and guile. If we may seek to obtain our ends by force, we may surely, it is argued, do so by fraud; for what is the moral difference between overcoming by superiority of muscle and the same result obtained by dint of brain? Lysander the Spartan went so far as to say that boys were to be cheated with dice, but an enemy with oaths; and if the world has professed horror at his sentiment, it has not altogether despised his authority. Among military stratagems the older writers used to include every kind of deception practised by generals in war, not only against the enemy, but against their own troops; as, for instance, devices for preventing or suppressing a mutiny, for stopping the spread of a panic, or for encouraging them with false news before or during an engagement. But in modern use the term stratagem has almost exclusive reference to artifices of deception practised against an enemy; and the greater interest that attaches to the latter kind of guile justifies the narrowed denotation of the word. No one, for instance, would now regard as a stratagem the clever behaviour of that Thracian general Cosingas, who, acting also as priest to his forces, brought them back to obedience by the report he artfully propagated that certain long ladders which he had caused to be made and fastened together were intended to enable him to climb to heaven, there to complain to Juno of their misconduct. The false pretence that is involved in a stratagem is addressed to the leaders of a hostile force, in order that their fear or confidence, unduly raised by it, may be played upon to the advantage of their more artful opponents. In the consideration, therefore, of military stratagems, or _ruses de guerre_, it is best to conform entirely to the more restricted sense in which they are understood in modern parlance. The following stratagem is a good one to start with. During the Franco-German War of 1870, twenty-five franc-tireurs clothed themselves in Prussian uniform, and by the help of that disguise killed several Prussians at Sennegy near Troyes; and the deed was made a subject of open boast in a French journal.[164] Was the boast a justifiable or a shameful one?