Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany’s was stirred; there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of the day when she should have to fight for her life against Germany; no national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the sterner stuff of which warriors are made. Success meant more comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would never have any need for soldiers. If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany, then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle’s test unquestionably developed certain sturdy qualities in a people which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with the prospect of spending money for shells to kill other people. With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liége--defended by the Belgian standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the _shipperke_ spirit was not universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred and fifty thousand men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions, which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France through the number of able-bodied refugees who were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over the world early in the war, characterising a whole nation with the gallantry of its young king and his little army. The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to practice war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens, as it came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.