with the deadliest efficiency, even to the wiping out of civilization,
because their education as slayers has been honestly and thoroughly
carried out. Essentially the rulers are all defectives; and there is
nothing worse than government by defectives who wield irresistible
powers of physical coercion. The commonplace sound people submit, and
compel the rest to submit, because they have been taught to do so as
an article of religion and a point of honor. Those in whom natural
enlightenment has reacted against artificial education submit because
they are compelled; but they would resist, and finally resist
effectively, if they were not cowards. And they are cowards because they
have neither an officially accredited and established religion nor a
generally recognized point of honor, and are all at sixes and sevens
with their various private speculations, sending their children perforce
to the schools where they will be corrupted for want of any other
schools. The rulers are equally intimidated by the immense extension
and cheapening of the means of slaughter and destruction. The British
Government is more afraid of Ireland now that submarines, bombs, and
poison gas are cheap and easily made than it was of the German Empire
before the war; consequently the old British custom which maintained a
balance of power through command of the sea is intensified into a terror
that sees security in nothing short of absolute military mastery of the
entire globe: that is, in an impossibility that will yet seem possible
in detail to soldiers and to parochial and insular patriotic civilians.


FLIMSINESS OF CIVILIZATION

This situation has occurred so often before, always with the same result
of a collapse of civilization (Professor Flinders Petrie has let out the
secret of previous collapses), that the rich are instinctively crying