[228] "The most demoralizing features in French military life," says Professor Guerard, a highly intelligent observer, "are due to an incontestable progress in the French mind--its gradual loss of faith and interest in military glory. Henceforth the army is considered as useless, dangerous, a burden without a compensation. Authors of school books may be censured for daring to print such opinions, but the great majority of the French hold them in their hearts. Nay, there is a prevailing suspicion among working men that the military establishment is kept up for the sole benefit of the capitalists, and the reckless use of troops in case of labour conflicts gives colour to the contention." It has often happened that what the French think to-day the world generally thinks to-morrow. There is probably a world-wide significance in the fact that French experience is held to show that progress in intelligence means the demoralization of the army. [229] The influence of Syndicalism has, however, already reached the English Labour Movement, and an ill-advised prosecution by the English Government must have immensely aided in extending and fortifying that influence. [230] Some small beginnings have already been made. "The greatest gain ever yet won for the cause of peace," writes Mr. H.W. Nevinson, the well-known war correspondent (_Peace and War in the Balance_, p. 47), "was the refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco in July, 1909.... So Barcelona flared to heaven, and for nearly a week the people held the vast city. I have seen many noble, as well as many terrible, events, but none more noble or of finer promise than the sudden uprising of the Catalan working people against a dastardly and inglorious war, waged for the benefit of a few speculators in Paris and Madrid." [231] J. Novikov, _Le Federation de l'Europe_, chap. iv. Olive Schreiner, _Woman and Labour_, chap. IV. While this is the fundamental fact, we must remember that we cannot generalize about the ideas or the feelings of a whole sex, and that the biological traditions of women have been associated with a primitive period when they were the delighted spectators of combats. "Woman," thought Nietzsche, "is essentially unpeaceable, like the cat, however well she may have assumed the peaceable demeanour." Steinmetz (_Philosophie des Krieges_, p. 314), remarking that women are opposed to war in the abstract, adds: "In practice, however, it happens that women regard a particular war--and all wars are particular wars--with special favour"; he remarks that the majority of Englishwomen fully shared the war fever against the Boers, and that, on the other side, he knew Dutch ladies in Holland, very opposed to war, who would yet have danced with joy at that time on the news of a declaration of war against England.