size. Leopold was not above crumbs; he made them profitable; he
liked to make money; and Belgians liked to make money.

Her defence guaranteed by neutrality, Belgium need have no thought
except of thrift. Her ideals were those of prosperity. No ambition of
national expansion stirred her imagination as Germany's was stirred;
there was no fire in her soul as in that of France in apprehension of
the day when she would have to fight for her life against Germany; no
national cause to harden the sinews of patriotism. The immensity of
her urban population contributed its effect in depriving her of the
sterner stuff of which warriors 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