s, moreover, nothing in
it but what is very honorable,--only, it is necessary that the customers
should be notified.

"Which we hereby do."

The great question of the army, of its relations with the civil
authority and of the apparent hopelessness of any attempt to reconcile
its maintenance and effectiveness with the democratic evolution of the
age,--never a more burning question in France than at the present
day,--scarcely admits of any of these pleasantries. But seldom have the
amenities of discussion more completely disappeared than in the polemics
now raging over the trial for treason of an officer of the general
staff. One of the more recent of these dispassionate studies of the
military problem appears in an article by M. Sully-Prudhomme in the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, and the failure of his attempt to solve the
antinomy is striking. "To say, with Renan," he prefaces, "that 'war is
essentially a thing of the ancien regime,' is to say that it is not of
the essence of the new one; and as formerly war would be considered as
destitute of any cause in the case where there were no enemies, that is
equivalent to supposing that to-day no people have enemies. Such an
assertion assuredly does not express Renan's meaning. He intended to
say, doubtless, that in our day the use of force to decide international
conflicts is in contradiction with the moral principles professed by
civilized nations; in other terms, that, logically, they should never
have enemies.

"Would to God that it were so! Unfortunately, we know only too well that
in reality this is not so. Therefore, no people, having a due regard for
their preservation and their independence, can reasonably diminish their
military forces, nor even risk diminishing them, unless other peoples do
as much. For any one who has informed himself in this respect as to the
dispositions of the greater number of them, this simple remark will
suffice to condemn in any one of them any attempt at individual reform
in its military laws in any manner tending to compromise its security in
the midst of the others."

But he finds, very naturally, that all the qualities of the military
spirit, and those conducive to military power, are becoming "more and
more incompatible with the inclinations of the individual, and contrary
to the expansion of his intellectual and impassioned life." None of the
methods proposed to diminish this incompatibility--civilizing war by an
attempt to reduce its