CONCLUSION. 493 



orders in their machine-like siibmissiveness. Without that, 

 her " organisation " would have failed. And those tales 

 were not exaggerated. I have heard them in Germany, from 

 German lips, from officers' lips — lips of men who had no 

 occasion whatever to foul their own nest. We know with 

 what abject deference an inferior is compelled to behave to 

 his superior — as a contrast to the good feeling and easy con- 

 duct maintained among our own soldiery, without any 

 prejudice to discipline. But we do not know in this country 

 how many thumbs are deliberately mutilated, at the time 

 of conscription, and other bodily injuries inflicted, to get 

 men off service. I have witnessed two mobilisations in 

 Prussia. During one I nearly had my head smashed by a 

 stone which was intended for officers in whose company I 

 happened to be. One does not expect to see such things 

 among ourselves. 



And how about organisation in our own and in German 

 Colonies ? Germany cannot claim to have made a success 

 of organisation there. How also about organisation of food 

 supply in time of war ? Herr von Batocki's organisation is 

 not remembered as a success. We did a good deal better, 

 at any rate. 



Such as it is, there are two great helps which Germany 

 has had for her peculiar form of organisation. One is, as 

 already observed, that general penury and severe want of 

 decades following foreign rule and depredations, which 

 made the strictest parsimony and husbanding of all things 

 imperative. That is a powerful stimulus to organisation. 

 And the other is the habit of abject discipline to which, not 

 in the army alone, German citizens arc methodically trained, 

 so that, as an ordinary matter, they do at the word of com- 

 mand fall instinctively and automatically into their places 

 and do whatever they are ordered. In matters of agricul- 

 tural organisation such strictly disciplined organisation is 

 assisted by the prestige of the administrative political officers 

 — who stand for a great deal in the establishment of agri- 

 cultural organisation turned to account for political purposes 

 — and the " gnadige Herr " of the " big house." Hence the 

 fierce objections raised in Germany by bona-fide co-opera- 



