instrument for war which it already is, but as a training school for the
Empire, likely to have incalculable effect upon the future.

How much I have heard of _training_ since my arrival in France! It is
not a word that has been so far representative of our English temper.
Far from it. The central idea of English life and politics, said Mr.
Bright, "is the assertion of personal liberty." It was, I suppose, this
assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing
before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military
Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that
looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier
and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a
reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

But, years ago, Matthew Arnold dared to say, in face of the general
British approval of Mr. Bright, that there is, after all, something
greater than the "assertion of personal liberty," than the freedom to
"do as you like"; and he put forward against it the notion of "the
nation in its collected and corporate character" controlling the
individual will in the name of an interest wider than that of
individuals.

What he had in view was surely just what we are witnessing in Great
Britain to-day--what we are about to witness in your own country--a
nation becoming the voluntary servant of an idea, and for that idea
submitting itself to forms of life quite new to it, and far removed from
all its ordinary habits; giving up the freedom to do as it likes;
accepting the extremities of discomfort, hardship, and pain--death
itself--rather than abandon the idea; and so putting itself to school,
resolutely and of its own free will, that when its piece of self-imposed