[70] See M. Messimy's Report on the War Budget for 1908 (annexe 3, p. 474). The importance of these figures is not generally realized. Astonishing as the assertion may sound, conscription in Germany is not universal, while it is in France. In the latter country every man of every class actually goes through the barracks, and is subjected to the real discipline of military training; the whole training of the nation is purely military. This is not the case in Germany. Very nearly half of the young men of the country are not soldiers. Another important point is that the part of the German nation which makes up the country's intellectual life escapes the barracks. To all practical purposes very nearly all young men of the better class enter the army as one year volunteers, by which they escape more than a few weeks of barracks, and even then escape its worst features. It cannot be too often pointed out that intellectual Germany has never been subjected to real barrack influence. As one critic says: "The German system does not put this class through the mill," and is deliberately designed to save them from the grind of the mill. France's military activities since 1870 have, of course, been much greater than those of Germany--Tonkin, Madagascar, Algeria, Morocco. As against these, Germany has had only the Hereros campaign. The percentages of population given above, in the text, require modification as the Army Laws are modified, but the relative positions in Germany and France remain about the same. [71] _Vox de la Naçión_, Caracas, April 22, 1897. [72] Even Mr. Roosevelt calls South American history mean and bloody. It is noteworthy that, in his article published in the _Bachelor of Arts_ for March, 1896, Mr. Roosevelt, who lectured Englishmen so vigorously on their duty at all costs not to be guided by sentimentalism in the government of Egypt, should write thus at the time of Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan message to England: "Mean and bloody though the history of the South American republics has been, it is distinctly in the interest of civilization that ... they should be left to develop along their own lines.... Under the best of circumstances, a colony is in a false position; but if a colony is a region where the colonizing race has to do its work by means of other and inferior races, the condition is much worse. There is no chance for any tropical colony owned by a Northern race." [73] June 2, 1910. [74] See an article by Mr. Vernon Kellogg in the _Atlantic Monthly_, July, 1913. Seeley says: "The Roman Empire perished for want of men." One historian of Greece, discussing the end of the Peloponnesian wars, said: "Only cowards remain, and from their broods came the new generations."