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Actual warfare generally takes this form now, but behind it one may always feel the latent or diplomatic warfare that consists in the calculation of armaments. A great Power says: “How much of Persia, Turkey, China, or Morocco do I dare to swallow? Germany, Russia, France, Japan, England, or Spain (as the case may be) will not like it if I swallow much. But what force could she bring against me, if it came to extremities, and what force could I set against hers?” Then the Powers set to counting up army corps and Dreadnoughts. In Dreadnoughts they seldom get their addition-sums right, but they do their poor best, strike a balance, and declare that a satisfactory agreement has been come to. This latent war is expensive, but cheaper than real war–and it is not bloody; it does not shock credit, though it weakens it; it does not ruin commerce, though it hampers it. The drain upon the nations is exhausting, but it does not kill men so horribly, and our rulers do not feel it; for the people pay, and the concession-hunters, the contractors, the company directors, and suchlike people with whom our rulers chiefly associate, grow very fat.

If, then, Norman Angell’s hopeful theory applies only partially to these common wars of Imperial aggrandisement and the perpetual diplomatic war by comparison of armaments, to what may we look for hope? Lord Rosebery would be the last person to whom one would look for hope in general. His hope is too like despair for prudence to smother. Yet, in his speech at the Press banquet during the Imperial Conference of 1909, when he spoke of our modern civilisation “rattling into barbarism,” he gave a hint of the movement to which alone I am inclined to trust. “I can only foresee,” he exclaimed, “the working-classes of Europe uniting in a great federation to cry: ‘We will have no more of this madness and foolery, which is grinding us to powder!'” The words may not have been entirely sincere–something had to be said for the Liberal Press tables, which cheered while the Imperialists sat glum; but there, I believe, lies the ultimate and only possible chance of hope. We must revolutionise our Governments; we must recognise the abject folly of allowing these vital questions of peace, war, and armaments to be decided according to the caprice or advantage of a single man, a clique of courtiers, a gang of adventurers, or the Cabal of a Cabinet formed from the very classes which have most to gain and least to lose, whether from actual war or the competition in armaments. Over this Executive, whether it is called Emperor, King, Court, or Cabinet, the people of the nation has no control–or nothing like adequate control–in foreign affairs and questions of war. In England in the year 1910 not a single hour was allowed for Foreign Office debate in the Commons. In no country of Europe have the men and women of the State a real voice in a matter which touches every man and every woman so closely as war touches them–even distant war, but far more the kind of war that devastates the larder, sweeps out the drawing-room, encamps in the back garden, and at any moment may reduce the family by half.[17] One remembers that picture in Carlyle, how thirty souls from the British village of Dumdrudge are brought face to face with thirty souls from a French Dumdrudge, after infinite effort. The word “Fire!” is given, and they blow the souls out of one another:

“Had these men any quarrel?” asks the Sartor. “Busy as
the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough
apart–were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a
Universe there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some
mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their
Governors had fallen out; and, instead of shooting one
another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.”