purpose of rendering effective the claims of State policy. To-day we
see that it is not sufficient for a nation to cultivate knowledge and
become intellectual, in the expectation that war will automatically go
out of fashion. It is quite possible to become very scientific, most
relentlessly intellectual, and on that foundation to build up ideals of
warfare much more barbarous than those of Assyria.

The conclusion seems to be that we are to-day entering on an era in
which war will not only flourish as vigorously as in the past, although
not in so chronic a form, but with an altogether new ferocity and
ruthlessness, with a vastly increased power of destruction, and on a
scale of extent and intensity involving an injury to civilisation and
humanity which no wars of the past ever perpetrated. Moreover, this
state of things imposes on the nations which have hitherto, by their
temper, their position, or their small size, regarded themselves as
nationally neutral, a new burden of armament in order to ensure that
neutrality. It has been proclaimed on both sides that this war is a war
to destroy militarism. But the disappearance of a militarism that is
only destroyed by a greater militarism offers no guarantee at all for
any triumph of Civilisation or Humanity.

What then are we to do? It seems clear that we have to recognise that
our intellectual leaders of old who declared that to ensure the
disappearance of war we have but to sit still and fold our hands while
we watch the beneficent growth of science and intellect were grievously
mistaken. War is still one of the active factors of modern life, though
by no means the only factor which it is in our power to grasp and
direct. By our energetic effort the world can be moulded. It is the
concern of all of us, and especially of those nations which are strong
enough and enlightened enough to take a leading part in human affairs,