obsolete now in war as the masks and shields of an old-time Chinese
brave. Liberal-minded people talk of the coming dangers of militarism in
the face of events that prove conclusively that professional militarism
is already as dead as Julius Caesar. What is coming is not so much the
conversion of men into soldiers as the socialisation of the economic
organisation of the country with a view to both national and
international necessities. We do not want to turn a chemist or
a photographer into a little figure like a lead soldier, moving
mechanically at the word of command, but we do want to make his
chemistry or photography swiftly available if the national organisation
is called upon to fight.

We have discovered that the modern economic organisation is in itself a
fighting machine. It is so much so that it is capable of taking on and
defeating quite easily any merely warrior people that is so rash as to
pit itself against it. Within the last sixteen years methods of fighting
have been elaborated that have made war an absolutely hopeless adventure
for any barbaric or non-industrialised people. In the rush of larger
events few people have realised the significance of the rapid squashing
of the Senussi in western Egypt, and the collapse of De Wet's rebellion
in South Africa. Both these struggles would have been long, tedious
and uncertain even in A.D. 1900. This time they have been, so to speak,
child's play.

Occasionally into the writer's study there come to hand drifting
fragments of the American literature upon the question of
"preparedness," and American papers discussing the Mexican situation. In
none of these is there evident any clear realisation of the fundamental
revolution that has occurred in military methods during the last two
years. It looks as if a Mexican war, for example, was thought of as an