a development in numbers, in reserve force, in organization, and in material for war, over which the economist perpetually wails, whose existence he denounces, and whose abolition he demands.  As freedom has grown and strengthened, so have they grown and strengthened.  Is this singular product of a century whose gains for political liberty are undeniable, a mere gross perversion of human activities, as is so confidently claimed on many sides? or is there possibly in it also a sign of the times to come, to be studied in connection with other signs, some of which we have noted?

What has been the effect of these great armies?  Manifold, doubtless.  On the economical side there is the diminution of production, the tax upon men’s time and lives, the disadvantages or evils so dinned daily into our ears that there is no need of repeating them here.  But is there nothing to the credit side of the account, even perhaps a balance in their favor?  Is it nothing, in an age when authority is weakening and restraints are loosening, that the youth of a nation passes through a school in which order, obedience, and reverence are learned, where the body is systematically developed, where ideals of self-surrender, of courage, of manhood, are inculcated, necessarily, because fundamental conditions of military success?  Is it nothing that masses of youths out of the fields and the streets are brought together, mingled with others of higher intellectual antecedents, taught to work and to act together, mind in contact with mind, and carrying back into civil life that respect for constituted authority which is urgently needed in these days when lawlessness is erected into a religion?  It is a suggestive lesson to watch the expression and movements of a number of rustic conscripts undergoing their first drills, and to contrast them with the finished result as seen in the faces and bearing of the soldiers that throng the streets.  A military training is not the worst preparation for an active life, any more than the years spent at college are time lost, as another school of utilitarians insists.  Is it nothing that wars are less frequent, peace better secured, by the mutual respect of nations for each other’s strength; and that, when a convulsion does come, it passes rapidly, leaving the ordinary course of events to resume sooner, and therefore more easily?  War now not only occurs more rarely, but has rather the character of an occasional excess, from which recovery is easy.  A century or more ago it was a chronic disease.  And withal, the military spirit, the preparedness—­not merely the willingness, which is a different thing—­to fight in a good cause, which is a distinct good, is more widely diffused and more thoroughly possessed than ever it was when the soldier was merely the paid man.  It is the nations now that are in arms, and not simply the servants of the king.