that boundary wall to crumble or has made a
breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due
to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to
a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French
corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against
them.

The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a
continental people still cherishing old traditions of nationality, and the
military training which is compulsory for all young men of average
health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their
minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an
island people protected by the sea. They know that they have been
born of women for one primary object--to fight when the time comes
in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the
great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from
some other country and race. At least that is the lesson taught them
from first to last in the schools and in the national assemblies, and
there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life
when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a
next-door neighbour may be replaced by friendship and common
interests.

The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people
and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which
England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so
that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of
recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be
used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to
join the Army. Their hearths and homes were not in immediate
danger. They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon
English soil. Their women were safe. Their property, bought on the
hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the
least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot. They
could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the
treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of
cards, and burying their babies. The British Expeditionary Force
which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going
out to foreign fields for a great adventure.

2

In France there were no such illusions. As soon as war was imminent
the people thought of th