the Vistula, and south of the Alps think so. The collective efforts of Europe towards rational policy have been halting enough, but as to one thing there has been general agreement, namely, that an overbearing supremacy of any one Power is not to be tolerated, and that war undertaken to frustrate that kind of dynastic or national ambition is just.

According to Professor Ostwald of Leipzig, Germany wants to organize Europe.' As that learned person is a chemist and not a historian, he may not be aware that Europe has already thrice refused to be organized at the bidding of any one dictator.

When Philip II of Spain sought a crown of universal dominion as the temporal reward of his zeal for the counter-Reformation, he failed even without being opposed by a formal coalition. A century later Louis XIV claimed to be the arbiter of Europe, and Europe turned upon him in such sort that the best informed Frenchmen accepted the Treaty of Utrecht as a providential deliverance from utter ruin impending on his kingdom. Another century passed, and a greater captain than any who had faced Eugene and Marlborough commanded, for a time, triumphs beyond any of Louis XIV's aspirations. After ten years of predominance he was cast down with a yet heavier fall. All these mighty men fell: "graviter magni magno cecidere ibi casu." Shall any stand where they could not stand? Can the Hohenzollerns overcome Europe's fourth refusal? The answer to that question, a century after Napoleon's final defeat, will be plain before long. Our point here, however, is only to call to mind that underlying all these dramatic failures is a constant principle, not so much a rule as a collective instinct of national self-preservation; working, hitherto, clumsily and with many drawbacks, but still discernible in the background

1 So too August Julius Langbehn as reported in the Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 9, 1915: Germany "by its very position must either dominate the political life of Europe or be dominated."

We have our Chauvinists in Great Britain, but I have not heard of any of them going so far as this, nor of any country other than Germany where the swagger of a common bully is uttered and received in sober earnest by learned and official persons. The heterogeneous composition of the British Empire is perhaps of itself a sufficient security against the dream (if any one should ever dream it) of organizing the world on any British pattern. Our Dominions have made their own constitutions, and made them each in its own way. Whenever India makes hers, which will hardly be in my time, it must be in an Indian and not a merely second-hand European way if it is not to be a failure.

of all schemes and combinations, and always perilous to those who neglect it. This principle is compendiously named the Balance of Power. Vituperation and ridicule have been showered on it by superficial politicians, foolishly taking it for a cause of the evil for which it was an imperfect remedy. Call it what you will, maxim, rule of policy, or mere tendency, it is rooted in the human nature of men who will not renounce the liberty of living in the fashion of their own countries. If statesmen are to be censured herein, it is not for recognizing that fundamental right, but for failing to give it better effect and to be impartial in their recognition. The conception of the Balance of Power is sound enough; the problem is to lift it out of the region of undefined and unordered usage and to clothe it with assured sanction in the future commonwealth of nations. It must also be protected from being made to serve as a stalking-horse for restless ambition and dynastic jealousy: such abuse is not unknown in modern history. Being really in the nature of homage from vice to virtue, this does not justify, though it partly explains, the denunciation of the principle itself by well-meaning advocates of lax and shallow liberalism, who must now be surprised to find themselves on the side of the anarchist military school. So did the English ultra-royalists after the Restoration find themselves, as to the fundamentals of secular polity, in the same boat with Hobbes, whose ecclesiastical doctrine they abhorred.

Besides the various accidents to which the want of defined authority must expose the Balance of Power doctrine, it suffers from a graver inherent defect. It becomes operative only when the mischief has already reached an acute stage and the time for milder remedies is past. Rulers who aim at domineering over their neighbors do not begin by talking about it even in their own official counsels. One quarrel at a time, and with the weaker adversaries first, is the modern way.2 More or less plausible reasons are seldom wanting; and, though the weaker state thus attacked will appeal for help in any quarter that seems at all promising, few cases are so simple that the grounds of such an appeal will evidently carry conviction if judged on the particular merits. There is no admitted duty to come to the aid of the weaker, nothing equivalent to the legal force of the medieval hue and cry. Nevertheless traces of a

2 Not that it is always politic. Certainly Polyphemus made the worst mistake of his life when he left Odysseus to be eaten last. But why be a cannibal at all?

wholesome usage, which seemed about to become a true custom of nations, were noted by an acute student of affairs half a century ago. W. A. Kinglake, the historian of the Crimean War, went so far as to speak of a "Supreme law or usage which forms the safeguard of Europe" in a chapter which, so far as I know, has been wholly neglected by professed writers on the law of nations.3 He suggests that "perhaps under a system ideally framed for the safety of nations and for the peace of the world a wrong done to one state would be instantly treated as a wrong done to all," but regrets that "in the actual state of the world there is no such bond between nations." Nevertheless there is not complete impunity for aggressors. Under certain conditions interference is possible and may even be called usual. When wrong is done to any state, when it is attended with consequences injurious to any of the Great Powers, and when that Power is in a position to exert its force with a fair prospect of success, then Europe is "accustomed to expect" that the Great Power so affected will either take arms or labor for an effective combination of neutral states. Kinglake proceeds to point the moral from the history of the Napoleonic wars, instancing the disastrous failure of Prussia to fulfil this expectation in 1805. His immediate object was to lead up to the contention that the Crimean War might and ought to have been prevented by a more firm and patient European diplomacy, had the Powers interested only taken a course of combined action betimes and adhered to it: a contention now of diminished interest, though I believe Kinglake's opinion is pretty generally accepted. It is too manifest that, so far as the recognition or efficacy of any such usage is concerned, whatever change has taken place since he wrote has been for the

worse.

In the generation preceding the War of 1914 we lived under a roughly approximate and, as it has proved, unstable equilibrium formed by groups of Powers - a constitution, if one may so call it, with two opposing parties and no government. The smaller states were for the most part either nominally protected by express treaties or attached to one or the other group by some such ties (not necessarily or exclusively of a material kind) as made it that group's interest to protect them at need; and it was commonly supposed

3 INVASION OF THE CRIMEA, vol. 1, ch. 2.

that they might thus count on a tolerable degree of security. But the Swiss made up their mind long ago to take no risk by putting their trust in either princes or treaties, and the event has shown that they were well advised. There was nothing in the nature of this rough equilibrium, nor in any of the international conventions made for various purposes, useful as these were in their sphere, to prevent indefinite increase of armaments under the stress of mutual fear and jealousy. Those passions were fruitful, and waxed stronger from year to year on the noxious growth of their own fruit. Certain well-meaning publicists darkened counsel and committed themselves to denying manifest facts by maintaining that such fears had no foundation at all. Events have sufficiently rebuked them, but it is not material to attempt any nice measure of their delusion. The mischief, at any rate, was there and obvious. A remedy was hardly less obvious, but obvious remedies are not always easy to put in practice. Overgrown armaments, it was said, might be checked by a general convention, if not for an actual proportional reduction, yet for arresting the process of growth; or if this was too cumbrous and complicated, much could still be done if one or two leading Powers in each group could come to an understanding and begin to set an example. It was no mere affair of discussion among publicists or in semi-official utterances. Limitation of armaments was the object aimed at, in the first instance, by the Emperor of Russia in convening the first Peace Conference held at The Hague in 1899. And yet nothing came of a proposal on the face of it so reasonable. All men, or almost all, spoke well of it in principle, but none were found to venture on a first step in execution. Great Britain alone among the European Powers was prepared to give any substantial support. Germany flatly refused to consider the subject at all at the Second Peace Conference of 1907. It must be admitted that effectual discussion would have called for disclosure of matters which could not well be put on the table of a cosmopolitan conference; but it is not so clear that, given a general will to reach a practical conclusion, the technical problems could not have been entrusted to a select and secret committee which would have reported results without entering on the details of its reasons. Official or demi-official proposals, of a less ambitious kind and confined to naval armament, were publicly made at later dates by the British to the German Government; but Germany, for whatever

reason, did not see the way to fall in with them to any considerable extent. The negotiations of 1912, now laid open to the world, did not in terms make any provision about armaments; they rather aimed at avoiding the technical difficulties by making war between the contracting Powers so unlikely that armaments might be safely reduced, or not further developed. It would take us too far to dwell on them here. But it may be observed that a treaty of conditional neutrality with no means of interpreting the conditions in case the parties differ, or a promise of "benevolent neutrality" in certain events, a term unknown or at least undefined in the law of nations, is not exactly the most hopeful instrument of peace one could desire.

For the sake of completeness it is well to mention one more conceivable check to military ambition which has been invoked by lovers of peace any time the last thousand years: the authority of the Church, or rather, since the Reformation, the influence of the many churches and congregations of modern Christendom. It is notorious that religious motives have never been effectual on a large scale to restrain war even between states professing exactly the same religion, to say nothing of the specially ferocious wars of which theological and ecclesiastical controversies were the cause or pretext. Between the Reformation and the French Revolution the Most Catholic King of Spain, the Most Christian King of France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy See itself in respect of its temporal possessions, were repeatedly at strife among themselves, one or more of them being as often as not in alliance with Protestant rulers against fellow Catholics. The ultimate historical reason lies far back and is plain enough. Christianity in its primitive form was the rule of a religious order which left secular government, war, peace, and politics altogether outside, and obeyed the temporal power without question in everything short of acknowledging its false gods. There is no knowing what a free and independent Christian Church might have done. But the conversion of Constantine, as it came about, entangled the Church in the existing system of the Roman Empire, committed it, after a brief glimpse of universal toleration, to persecution of dissidents, and made it impossible for officialized Christianity to take up any firm position against militarism. The voice of the Society of Friends may be not far from the mind of the really primitive Church, but it is a voice crying in