A day or two later Germany flung down her challenge to Christianity and Civilization, stripped herself of the cloak of decency and stood revealed in stark brutishness; and on Tuesday, August 4, 1914, England took up the challenge and declared war. The decision was apparently not expected by the German Staff. To them it was rather a matter for exasperation than for apprehension. England had her hands full at home, and her vast possessions would prove a source of weakness. She had a small regular army, a force with high traditions, well trained and well equipped for service on the frontiers of India and other outposts of the Empire, containing a larger proportion of officers and men with experience of actual fighting than any other army of the Great Powers, yet so small in numbers and so scattered over the face of the globe, that one can almost sympathize with the German belief that the few thousand men who could be spared from the duty of policing India, Egypt, South Africa, and other possessions, might safely be regarded as negligible. She had, too, a small, indifferently trained and equipped, unprofessional, home-defence force, but even the British themselves did not take the Territorials seriously. As to the rest of the potential fighting material of the British Isles, had it not been proved to the satisfaction of the Germans (who had made a special study of such matters with the typical Teutonic thoroughness which works so efficiently when applied to material facts, and fails so lamentably when the human factor enters) that the young manhood of the nation was mainly decadent, of poor physique, weak-chested, half-educated, lacking in patriotic purpose, with no thought of the morrow and no ideals? With the exception of the few hundred thousands who had received some training in physical drill and discipline in the Boys’ Brigade and its daughter-organizations which teach discipline, self-respect, and _esprit de corps_, or in the School Cadet Corps, all were utterly untrained, and they hated discipline. England had clearly shown that she was too selfish to submit to any form of compulsory service; too wrapped up in the love of comfort, ease and luxury to do more than bribe fools to die for her. It was a nation that had lost its soul. The military aid she could give to France could be contemptuously brushed aside. When France had been paralysed and the Channel ports secured, the British mercantile marine could be sunk or scared off the seas, and the British Empire brought to its knees.