themselves to the Rhine, and see the perfection of all the
arrangements of his regiment. And now, if you think his "bad habits,"
his daily violations of your notions of propriety, have diminished
his power of meeting death calmly--that noblest of products of
culture--you have only to follow him up as far as Sedan and see
whether he ever flinches; whether you have ever read or heard of
a soldier out of whom more marching and fighting and dying,
and not flighty, boisterous dying either, could be got.

Now, we can very well understand why people should be unwilling
to see the Prussian military system spread into other countries,
or even be preserved where it is. It is a pitiful thing to have
the men of a whole civilized nation spending so much time out of
the flower of their years learning to kill other men; and the
lesson to be drawn from the recent Prussian successes is
assuredly not that every country ought to have an army like the
Prussian army, though we confess that, if great armies must be
kept up, there is no better model than the Prussian. The lesson
is that, whether you want him for war or peace, there is no way
in which you can get so much out of a man as by training him, and
training him not in pieces but the whole of him; and that the
trained men, other things being equal, are pretty sure in the
long run to be the masters of the world.



THE COMPARATIVE MORALITY OF NATIONS


We had, four or five weeks ago, a few words of controversy with the