"Would to God that it were so! Unfortunately, we know only too well that in reality this is not so. Therefore, no people, having a due regard for their preservation and their independence, can reasonably diminish their military forces, nor even risk diminishing them, unless other peoples do as much. For any one who has informed himself in this respect as to the dispositions of the greater number of them, this simple remark will suffice to condemn in any one of them any attempt at individual reform in its military laws in any manner tending to compromise its security in the midst of the others." But he finds, very naturally, that all the qualities of the military spirit, and those conducive to military power, are becoming "more and more incompatible with the inclinations of the individual, and contrary to the expansion of his intellectual and impassioned life." None of the methods proposed to diminish this incompatibility--civilizing war by an attempt to reduce its horrors, modifying the rigors of discipline, specializing and restricting the military service--are available; the last two, indeed, are directly at variance with the necessities of the actual situation. For the acceptance thus rendered necessary of this survival of the past, this persistence of war and all its consequences, he finds that the intelligence may recognize the fact that to place itself under the direction of those more competent is not necessarily to abdicate, that an unprejudiced examination will demonstrate the necessity of military obedience. For the soul, for the spiritual qualities, he finds nothing in the progress of modern ideas "to aid in the perfecting of the instruments and the apprenticeship of death." The blind fanaticism of the Mohammedans, the unquestioning faith of the early Christians, which faced extinction even with joy, have been replaced among modern men by sceptical, questioning, and even material philosophies which "offer us really nothing which is worthy a sincere faith in a dream, in a survival eternal and heavenly." So true is this, that, were he able, by enlightening him, to detach a Breton conscript from his blind faith which enables him to die bravely for the honor of the country, he would not do so, he would "prefer to betray philosophy." "A ridiculous compromise, perhaps, but certainly less disastrous than a defeat. This is one of the ironical inconsequences to which war condemns us, and for which it alone is responsible. Whilst waiting for its suppression, let us resign ourselves to submit to it, and let us endeavor to make the best of its violences; it imposes upon us at least the cultivation of the virile virtues, the esteem of a labor which does not enrich, and which places us in a position to interrogate very closely, willingly or unwillingly, the profundity of the tomb."