arriors are made. Success meant more
comforts and luxuries. In towns like Brussels and Antwerp this
doubtless had its effect on the moralities, which were hardly of the
New England Puritan standard. She had a small standing army; a
militia system in the process of reform against the conviction of the
majority, unlike that of the Swiss mountaineers, that Belgium would
never have any need for soldiers.

If militarism means conscription as it exists in France and Germany,
then militarism has improved the physique of races in an age when
people are leaving the land for the factory. The prospect of battle's
test unquestionably develops in a people certain sturdy qualities
which can and ought to be developed in some other way than with
the prospect of spending money for shells to kill people.

With the world making every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing
convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege--defended by the Belgian
standing army--had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten
German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not
universal, that at no time had Belgium more than a hundred thousand
men under arms, and that on the Dixmude line she maintained never
more than eighty thousand men out of a population of seven millions,
which should yield from seven hundred thousand to a million; while
they lost a good deal of sympathy both in England and in France,
from all I heard, through the number of able-bodied refugees who
were disinclined to serve. It was a mistaken idealism that swept over
the world, early in the war, characterizing a whole nation with the
gallantry of its young king and his little army.

The spirit of the Boers or of the Minute Men at Lexington was not in
the Belgian people. It could not be from their very situation and
method of life. They did not believe in war; they did not expect to
practise war; but war came to them out of the still blue heavens as it
came to the prosperous Incas of Peru.

Where one was wrong was in the expectation that her bankers and
capitalists--an aristocracy of money not given to the simple life--and
her manufacturers, artisans, and traders, if not her peasants, would
soon make truce with Caesar for individual profit. Therein, Belgium
showed that she was not lacking in the moral spirit which, with the
schipperke's, became a fighting spirit. It seemed as if the metal of
many Belgians, struck to a white heat in the furnace of war, had
cooled unde