thinking, should have failed to realise the possibility of another great
war, similar to the Napoleonic struggle of a hundred years ago. For nearly
half a century the great European States had been at peace: and we had come
to look upon their condition, and the attachment of their peoples, as being
as ancient and as stable as our own. We had grown used to the map of Europe
as it had been left by the great convulsions between 1848 and 1871. Upon
the basis of that map and of the governments represented on it, and in
response to the growing needs of the world as a whole, we had embarked on
every kind of international co-operation and cosmopolitan effort. The Hague
Congress, convened by the Tsar of Russia, looked forward to the day when
war, and the causes of war, should be obsolete. The Socialist Movement, a
growing force in all industrial communities, stood for the same ideal, and
for the international comradeship of the working class. Law and medicine,
science and scholarship followed suit; and every summer, in quest of
health and change, thousands of plain citizens have crossed international
frontiers with scarcely greater sense of change than in moving from
province to province in a single State. Commerce and industry, the greatest
material forces of our time, have become inextricably international, and
in the palpable injury in which a war would involve them some thinkers
of clear but limited vision saw the best hope of averting a European
conflagration.

And yet, throughout these two generations of economic and social
development, the fear of war has never been absent from the mind of Europe.
Her emperors and statesmen have talked of peace; but they have prepared for
war, more skilfully and more persistently than ever before in the history
of Europe or of the world. Almost the entire manhood of every European
nation but England has been trained to arms; and the annual war budget of
Europe rose, in time of peace, to over 300 million pounds. The States of
Europe, each afraid to stand alone against a coalition of possible rivals,