nobility joined with the enemy, faced the alternative of a struggle with every resource it had or extinction and the gallows. The principle of conscription was decreed for the first time by a great nation. Every man capable of bearing arms must serve or hold himself ready to serve. And national industries also were mobilized, even if crudely. Theoretically, at least, all the iron-workers of France went to work on guns, cannon, pikes and ammunition. In the very streets of Paris stood the forges, hammering out bayonets.
There followed the twenty years of the Napoleonic wars, wherein conscription was applied in fact if not always in name. From that time, through fifty years of comparative peace, the thing grew as a principle of statecraft. It did not become settled and universal, however, until after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Prussia, ambitious leader of the German states, herself led by men with ruthless genius, had applied the principle of conscription, had planned and studied the possibilities of modern warfare as they had never been studied before. The German army was ready “to the last buckle” when it burst on France, swept up the brave but ill-organized army of MacMahon, took Metz and Paris, and in six months brought about a peace which tore from France two provinces, nearly her whole supply of iron ore, a discriminating tariff agreement, and the unprecedented indemnity of a billion dollars. Germany had shown the way to the militarists.
