Before the battle of Jena, 1806, the Prussian army was made up of peasants forced to serve under the nobles, who took the offices. Townsmen were excluded from the army. The peasant’s forced service lasted twenty years. The system was as inefficient as it was unequal, and a commission was appointed to reform it. The result was the modern system of universal service, put into complete operation in 1813. After a hundred years it is possible to see some of the effects of the system on the ideals of the people. It has taught them to work together in their places, formed habits of promptness and cleanliness, and lessened the provincialism of the lower classes. It has been a great training school in nationalism, preserving the love of country and instilling in the minds of the masses a warm devotion to the military traditions of the nation. It has also produced results of a questionable value. By fostering the military spirit it has developed a desire for war, on the same principle that a boy in possession of a sharp hatchet has a strong impulse to hack away at his neighbor’s shrubbery. It is probable that the temptation to use a great and superior army was a vital fact in bringing on the present war. Furthermore, the wide-spread habit of docility leaves a people without self-assertion and enables their rulers to impose upon them. As to the influence of universal service in promoting militarism, that has been frequently mentioned. On the other hand, it should be borne in mind that not all states that have had universal military training have been saddled with these evils. France, for example, has had universal training without becoming obsessed with the passion for war and without the loss of popular individualism. It seems well to say that universal training itself does not produce the evils sometimes attributed to it. In Germany, at least, it seems that it was the purpose for which the army existed, and not the army itself, that developed militarism and brought other unhappy effects. Probably the German army before the war was the most efficient great human machine then in existence. There was less waste in it and less graft than in any other army. Since the army included all the men of the empire at some stage or other of their existence, it was a great training school in organization. Its effects on German history are hardly to be exaggerated.