this advantage by better military organization." Probably this view of the Three Years Service law was the view held by all save the relatively small and highly-integrated war-faction; and in so far as military measures are ever reasonable, this, like the corresponding measures taken in Germany, must be regarded as reasonable. As M. Pichon told Baron Guillaume, "We are not arming for war, we are arming to avoid it, to exorcise it. … We must go on arming more and more in order to prevent war." There is no reason whatever to suppose that this view was not sincerely entertained by M. Pichon and by many others, probably by a majority of the persons most responsibly concerned.
But the consequences of the Three Years Service law were contemplated by Baron Guillaume with great apprehension. He reports on 12 June, 1913, that "the burden of the new law will fall so heavily upon the population, and the expenditure which it will involve will be so exorbitant, that there will soon be an outcry in the country, and France will be faced with this dilemma: either renounce what she can not bear to forgo, or else, war at short notice." Of the militarist party now in the ascendancy, he says: "They are followed with a sort of infatuation, a kind
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