and equipment, but it was an enormous proportion. Great Britain
spent upon army and navy money and capacity, that directed into
the channels of physical culture and education would have made
the British the aristocracy of the world. Her rulers could have
kept the whole population learning and exercising up to the age
of eighteen and made a broad-chested and intelligent man of every
Bert Smallways in the islands, had they given the resources they
spent in war material to the making of men. Instead of which
they waggled flags at him until he was fourteen, incited him to
cheer, and then turned him out of school to begin that career of
private enterprise we have compactly recorded. France achieved
similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse; Russia
under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards
bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and
countless swarms of little Smallways. The Asiatic peoples had
been forced in self-defence into a like diversion of the new
powers science had brought them. On the eve of the outbreak of
the war there were six great powers in the world and a cluster of
smaller ones, each armed to the teeth and straining every nerve
to get ahead of the others in deadliness of equipment and
military efficiency. The great powers were first the United
States, a nation addicted to commerce, but roused to military
necessities by the efforts of Germany to expand into South
America, and by the natural consequences of her own unwary
annexations of land in the very teeth of Japan. She maintained
two immense fleets east and west, and internally she was in
violent conflict between Federal and State governments upon the
question of universal service in a defensive militia. Next came
the great alliance of Eastern Asia, a close-knit coalescence of
China and Japan, advancing with rapid strides year by year to