assertion are the chief factors of international discord that now
threaten the peace of the world.

In order to maintain that indefensible claim she is driven to
aggression and intrigue in every quarter of the globe; to setting
otherwise friendly peoples by the ears; to forming "alliances" and
ententes, to dissolving friendships, the aim always being the old one,
_divide et impera_.

The fact that Europe to-day is divided into armed camps is mainly due
to English effort to retain that mastery of the sea. It is generally
assumed, and the idea is propagated by English agencies, that Europe
owes her burden of armaments to the antagonism between France and
Germany, to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine by France, and the spirit and
hope of a _revanche_ thereby engendered. But this antagonism has long
ceased to be the chief factor that moulds European armaments.

Were it not for British policy, and the unhealthy hope it proffers
France would ere this have resigned herself, as the two provinces
have done, to the solution imposed by the war of 1870. It is England
and English ambition that beget the state of mind responsible for
the enormous growth of armaments that now over-shadows continental
civilization. Humanity, hemmed in in Central Europe by a forest of
bayonets and debarred all egress to the light of a larger world by a
forbidding circle of dreadnoughts, is called to peace conferences and
arbitration treaties by the very power whose fundamental maxim of rule
ensures war as the normal outlook for every growing nation of the Old
World.

If Europe would not strangle herself with her own hands she must