When that time comes, two observations will certainly be offered: first, that it is vain to expect that the advance of physical science can be arrested by the fiat of the international lawyers; and secondly, that the discoveries of science are of so impalpable and elusive a character that even if a League of Nations were voluntarily to place itself under restrictions as to the military use of scientific inventions, no member of the League could feel adequately secured that its fellows were observing the pact.

We have then to recognize the fact that mankind may fail to obtain any agreed restriction of these new and more terrible applications of knowledge to military purposes. It is, indeed, most probable that any endeavour further to limit or modify the instruments of war in the name of humanity will be foiled by the inexorable march of science. Just as the bow and arrow displaced the sling, and the bow was displaced by the musket, and this again by the rifle, so all our modern implements of war may in a short space of time yield to a machinery more formidable than any of which the world has yet experience. There are only two methods of averting such a contingency, neither likely to commend itself. The first is a general and agreed determination on the part of the governments of the world to abstain from the use of new scientific expedients, and the second is the concerted refusal of the laboratories to supply them. Whether our men of science can ever be brought to such a point of pacificism may be doubted; but if the laboratories are not converted, the American zealots for the outlawry of war' will make little progress towards their end.

The real limiting force will, we suspect, be found in a very different sphere. International law will do something, but it will not do very much. What will abridge wars and divest them of some of their potential horrors will be the huge

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initial cost of undertaking them. If scientific warfare were as cheap as it is now fortunately expensive, there would be very little hope of saving humanity from evils which might shatter the fabric of civilization itself. But the cost of killing a single enemy under the conditions of modern warfare is equivalent to the value of an old master or a successful thoroughbred, and before expenditure upon such a scale even the most quarrelsome nation may be disposed to hesitate. The discovery of some really inexpensive means of wholesale destruction would change the face of the problem, and at once raise the question in its most acute form whether human society had the strength and wisdom to combine for its own survival.

In such a last emergency the sentiment which goes to the making of international law could alone save civilization.

ΧΙ

THE REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS

Ce qui compte pour la guerre ce n'est pas le nombre abstrait des hommes,

c'est le total des hommes instruits.'-M. PALÉOLOGUE.

'What counts in war is not the size of the population, but the number of trained men.'

'La guerre est une chose trop sérieuse pour qu'on la laisse aux militaires.’ -A. BRIAND.

'War is too serious a matter to be left to the soldiers.'

THE experience of the late war has imparted a new character of urgency to a question which has often been asked before, but without any sanguine or widespread expectation of an answer. Is war an inevitable outcome of human nature? Can it be averted either by a better organization of international relations or by a new direction of educational effort? Or must we to the end of time expect that wars will continue to be waged, each more destructive than the last, as science improves its lethal weapons, with every advance in patriotic self-discipline which the high organization of a modern State may secure?

This is no longer an academic question, the discussion of which is confined to a narrow circle of philosophical students. Plain men and women, who are neither philosophers nor students, are compelled to regard the problem of war and its prevention as one of the primary preoccupations of society. They see two things now very clearly: first, that the world may drift and blunder into a great disaster, without any clear-cut will to war moving the rulers of the contending States; and second, that modern scientific war takes on a character of mechanical destructiveness so alarming, so care

less of the old immunity of the non-combatant population, so limitless in its possible extensions, that the problem of the prevention of war assumes a new form. It is no longer a question of an evil easily localized and by its nature so limited as to affect a very small section of the population in the combatant population, no longer a question of a malady which may easily have no injurious sequelae, but on the contrary effect an improvement in the health of the patient. Modern war differs so greatly from the wars of the pre-scientific age in its contagiousness, its range of destruction, and its cost, that it raises an entirely new problem. It compels us to ask whether if civilized society does not succeed in extirpating war, war will not succeed in extirpating civilized society.

One conclusion will be generally accepted. Though the incident which gives rise to a war may be trivial, the predisposing causes are for the most part weighty and complex. A diplomatist may commit an error, a Cabinet may be carried off its feet by a gust of passion or prejudice, and from either of these causes a war may result which with wiser or more prudent handling might have been averted. But nations are not brought to the point at which such accidents are possible save by a long train of exacerbating preliminaries. The fault of a diplomatist does not occasion a rupture between two countries unless there has been a considerable period of previous tension. A Cabinet in a democratic State does not lead a nation into war unless it is assumed in advance that it will receive support, grounded either upon adequate previous intellectual preparation or upon strong traditional antagonisms or else the clear and manifest sense of injury and indignity which the advertisement of the quarrel is likely to disclose. Great wars for the most part arise from great passions and involve great issues. In the first glow of controversial resentment a war may be attributed to this or that statesman; but history,

gradually shaking itself free from the mists of contemporary prejudice, spreads the responsibility more widely, showing how all the various elements of national life which tend to inflame opinion or to make war an interesting or familiar thought to a people combine to create the atmosphere in which a single flying spark may spread a desolating conflagration through a whole countryside.

Among the larger predisposing causes of international suspicion, there is none more obvious than the growth of armaments. Every nation has the right to secure itself against attack, and if all nations were equally powerful and equally impregnable, any temptation to war which might arise from a reasonable expectation of success would be removed. It has therefore sometimes been argued that great armaments tend to the preservation of peace, and that the military weakness of a country is an invitation to its neighbours to invade it. We do not deny that weak countries have been attacked by powerful neighbours, or that under weak governments conditions of disorder may easily arise which are calculated to lead to forcible intervention from outside. A great disparity of military power between two high-spirited and ambitious States, whose political interests are divergent, may tempt the nation which is conscious of being possessed of the superior military force to presume upon its position and to adopt a dictatorial tone in its diplomacy which arouses resentment and produces reprisals.

But all this argument rests upon the supposition of a disparity of force, not of a balance either scale of which is lightly weighted by mutual agreement. And the case for such a lightly weighted balance rests upon the undoubted fact that heavy and expanding armaments lead to war, that a State fully organized for war is more likely to pick a quarrel than a State which realizes that it is unprepared, that vast preparations