MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2nd, 1914.

ARMS AND DISARMAMENT.

By DORA MARSDEN.

THAT friendly twilight of inattention which even the safest cause requires, the War has rudely scattered for the disarmament propagandists. An inconsiderate fate has flashed upon these would-be harmless people the critical light which looks to doctrines only to judge of their application, and not at all to the possibilities for unending delight in unendable disputations which they possess. The cause of "disarmament," dragged forth for judgment in the presence of the undoctrinated, is compelled willy-nilly to state a case: and as far as the powers of its advocates hitherto have been able to make clear it appears—just "a case" and nothing more. The propagandists have been at no pains to put anything in it: the most elementary notions of their cause they have been content to leave sacred, which is unexamined. Disarmament has been apparently just the slogan of a "cause" intending to imply no more than the pious application to international affairs of Mr. Watts' sentiment in regard to little children—little nations should agree and keep their angry passions down. Hence for light on disarmament one need not turn to the doctrines of the initiated: one must start from the beginning and make shift for oneself. What are "arms," anyway? A dictionary says, "any mechanism which is set in motion from the shoulder," so that disarmament would start with a surgical operation at the shoulder presumably. But no disarmer has ever intended that: only annihilation of the means of attack and defence. What human arms are if not just these means in their ultimate sense is not clear, and the fact that all extensions of such means have been compendiously termed "arms," seems to leave them compromised to say the least. And thinking on the matter still more intently, one has to acknowledge that it must just have been the specific allocating of limbs to the service of attack and defence as human arms, which raised one animal above all the rest, and created the human. The evolution of arms:

the raising of the fore limbs in order to protect the more vulnerable head, and in order to add the weight and damage of paw and claw to that of fang, called into being, as it were incidentally, an animal which habitually stood upright: an animal which arms had made into a man.... But disarmers have found difficulties sufficiently numerous far nearer the threshold of their inquiry than "lopping from the shoulder" constitutes, and it is only "arms" external to the finger-tips which they would gladly see forbidden and destroyed, while scratching, hitting, kicking, biting, remain as offensives which must be allowed, because they may not be avoided therefore. Not fighting, but fighting with weapons is the bug-bear: and especially one is given to understand weapons which have working alliances with gunpowder. Someone who was writing recently on the subject kindly offered to explain why: to wit, "The common sense of the world to-day knows that if civilisation is to be preserved it must not rest on gunpowder." At first blush, to be sure, gunpowder does seem an uncertain seat for anything to rest on, but on thinking further one is struck by the fact that civilisation appears to select gunpowder, and that by a strong preference. It must, indeed, be singularly annoying to those whose common sense leads them to such an opinion as the one quoted, to have to observe how the more we have of gunpowder the more unmistakably does civilisation come into evidence. The sequence is constant enough to suggest the relation of cause and effect: gunpowder civilisation. But many would prefer to call this mere coincidence. For the moment therefore, we may leave it, confident that even such will agree that that which they hold to be the opposite of civilisation, i. e., war fiercest war—did not wait for the advent of gunpowder to make its appearance. Nor even for the bow or the sword or the spear. Before the first stone was flung war was there.

* * * *

Accordingly, if the aim of the disarmer is to eliminate war, a restriction exercised according to the character of weapons used will produce only illusory effects: since instruments capable of being used on the offensive —were their owners so minded as to use them—would include almost every instrument of utility and ornament: axe, club, scythe, bodkin, hairpin, the common arbiters of domestic polity, the poker and the boot, would all offer themselves at need in default of gunpowder. The ploughshare and pruning-hook, the often proffered antitheses of weapons of offence could be relied upon to do effective damage were they the only weapons available in the field. Given pause for reflection, the genuine disarmer may well begin to feel force and pertinence in the logic which starts disarmament from the shoulder-socket, since almost anything that the human arm can wield for peaceful use it can wield equally well as a weapon of effective offence. He will begin to realise that it is not weapons but human temper which exerts the lure towards war, the undermining force of civilisations: kinds of armaments are incidental; all that matters in regard to them being that they shall compete in effectiveness with those of the opponent. Their requisite character is purely relative. It is the spirit of war which is the absolute, and war is whenever there is antagonistic temper or desire for status or possessions. It is entirely a question of interests—the interwoven mesh of desires which net the antagonistic animus. Interests are the pride of life, and, given interests strong enough, men will use all and any arms they can come by for their furtherance. War itself—which is simply the active side of interests—exerts the attraction of settling of the world's perspective to one's own liking, over and against that of the enemy, who endeavours to do a like thing on his own behalf. An enemy is not therefore a person whom one hates: he is a person one fights. It is unintelligent to hate him because he is an enemy, because it is precisely to be such that we have created him. He is a necessity of our combativeness. He is most profitably regarded as the satisfaction of a primary want, like food or a lover. Our antagonisms are teeming with vitality: they possess the vitalising hardness by resisting which we brace ourselves. It is a poor soul which must deprive itself the luxury of a good enemy. * * * *

The fact that civilised authorities discourage their peoples from having enemies except such as they themselves duly authorise, goes a long way towards revealing the actual nature of civilisation. We quoted above a writer who believed that the common sense of the world opines there is something antagonistic between civilisation and gunpowder (by which latter is meant, we may assume, armaments on the modern enormous scale). Yet, as we pointed out, the big gun has the appearance of being the greatly prolific progenitor of just those forms of society which we call civilised. And inevitably, settled peace is the display of force so unmistakably irresistible that it is not within the limits of possibility for the conquered powers to gainsay it. Force—a force that is— asserts and establishes itself. It is now, therefore, in the ascendant: it makes known its will: which is now the sole dominant will: it delineates its own conception of the forms its expressed will desires to take; that is, it outlines its species of order. It lays this conception of its order on the conquered, demanding for its execution an unquestioning obedience and for guidance in carrying it into being effectively and smoothly it frames laws. A law is a command accompanied by a threat, in case of refusal, to use all or any of the forces of compulsion which it is known or assumed are at the disposal of the framers. It can be taken for granted that a community in which the laws are accepted without question—which is highly civilised, that is—has its forces of compulsion in effective condition and well under the influence of those at whose inspiration the laws are made. To say that "the individual does not suffer in honour or interest because law has replaced violence in his social relationship," is to give evidence of complete incomprehension of the question at issue: law does not replace violence: it merely gives information detailing the manner in

which violence will be directed. If one can manage to square one's honour and interest with the incidence of violence, well and good: if not, tant pis: one meets the violence. On this wise is the only authorised enemy of civilised society discovered to us, i. e., the flouter and disturber of the "Law and Order" ordained by the paramount: disturbers of the peace, which has been commanded by the force which commands the most effective gunpowder. The gentle ways and modes of civilised society take rise in precisely the same manner as similar phenomena appear among children of a stern parent who likes an ordered peace in his house and is powerful enough to see that he gets it. The children do not quarrel among themselves because "Father" finds it a confusion and an annoyance. Quarrelling upsets his "Order ": the rebellious child is the domestic criminal.

* * * *

It is, therefore, easy to trace how the possession of forceful and successful arms affords to a great power (particularly in these modern times of enormous armaments, whose very enormity puts them beyond the possession of the people, and makes the State the obvious custodian) the basis upon which it can begin to build its particular brand of civilisation. Freed by its power from gainsaying both from without and within, such a State has leisure and authority to call into being an "Ordered Society," to become civilised that is. An ordered society means precisely what it says—a society which shapes itself in conformity with the orders given by the manipulators of the armed forces in its midst: orders which, described as laws, perforce the people must obey. For no large body of people, apart from unusual moments of danger, obey orders unless the possibility to do otherwise does not lie in their possession. Such a condition of deficient power can only be effected by a body which is by comparison superiorly armed. A State possessing formidable and centrally-controlled armaments, with which the defensive weapons of those whose obedience is demanded cannot hope to compete, is precisely this body. Such a State commands just the conditions necessary to the laying down of orders which will effect peaceful submission between itself and its peoples, and if it so desires—and it usually does—peace among the individuals one with another, whose differences must be settled through its own appointed media. It can afford to take up the position that it will "stand no nonsense" in regard to disorder between individual and individual: can afford to insist on the regulation of social life by civil means, i. e., by means of vicarious violence. Individuals may settle and arrange matters among themselves only within limits: by verbal or written means. Violence remains the prerogative of the State. Such is the basis of civilisation, and it explains what civilisation is the expression of: i. e., enforcement by violent compulsion of ways of settlement among a governed people who have been deprived of any power of gainsaying such external settlement by a previous deprival of arms. It is this settling of intraindividual affairs by civil means which is called Justice. "Civilisation must rest not upon gunpowder but upon Justice." Well, well: it amounts very much to the same thing! "I rest not upon this planet but upon this couch." Though civilisation depends upon Justice, Justice depends upon gunpowder, and civilisation therefore depends upon gunpowder ultimately. It is, as a matter of fact, however, a favour allowed in charity to the rhetoricians to admit that civilisation rests upon Justice: Justice and civilisation—abstractions both at best—are not two things but one. Civilisation is rather related to Justice as a special case. It is Justice in limited and secondary application. Basic Justice is coincident with gunpowder.

* * * *

If, then, Justice fails the would-be disarmers: if Justice be not some transcendant and archetypal figure enthroned in the heavens before Earth or Time was, but, as far as civilisation is concerned, merely the internexus of guarantees for contracts of which the nature is conditioned by the arbitrament of arms, on what other

supports may disarmament fall back? Two for their support have been furnished: a rationalist and a theocratic: the authority of "The World" and of "God." Both are passionately espoused, and naturally, for support for a task stupendous and baffling cannot be lightly foregone. Note what the task is on which the disarmers have set their hearts: it is the acquiring of supreme instruments of compulsion in order to overcome compulsion while yet anathematising compulsory instruments. They would themselves compel all men else to believe that compulsion is "wrong." Hitherto compulsion has always led to armaments, but what now when compulsion would compel towards disarmaments? If all others are to be compelled not to arm at all, some authority must arm itself very efficiently. The power which undertakes to abolish Napoleonism will need to be very greatly and grandly Napoleonic. So this thing runs in a circle: Napoleonism is ever under the curse yet ever triumphant, ever to be brought under the heel yet ever on the heights. Hence the attempt to create a Napoleonic power which need fear no rival: The World. It is odd how at every great crisis "reason" reverts to this fetish of "The World versus The Recalcitrant": odd because in every attempt to apply it "The World" itself furnishes the subversive elements which make the rebel triumphant; "The World," in fact, cannot be the Super-Napoleon because "The World" cannot hang together. Napoleonism represents a progressive cohesion, while "The World" is the loose and disparate sum-total of disintegrating differences. It is unable to cohere: a poor opponent, therefore, for even a lilliputian Napoleon. One is compelled to realise that "The World" does not mean what it would imply, but relies for its impressiveness upon its good comprehensive sound. On a closer scrutiny "The World" appears one of those all inclusive generalisations which mean nothing because they aspire to mean everything. What does "The World" mean to any of us ? Who stands for "The World" ? One could almost as readily develop a partisan ardour in favour of a constellation as become enthusiastic over "The World." Even the religions which were founded to "save" "The World" in order to wake an interest were compelled to split it up to furnish a portion which could be assigned to damnation. In fact, interest can live only upon difference, and those who have argued that because out of "The World" many States have been carved they can, therefore, by a simple process of addition, collect the States together and obtain for "The World" the united coercive power of all the States' "virtues" in order to annihilate in each all their particular vices, and all to the glory of the unified creation called "The World," have strayed lamentably in their reckoning. States are States (nationalities if one prefers so to call them), not because they are alike but because they are different. They exist not to accommodate what their neighbours consider their virtues, but the traits they consider their vices. All splits take place in order to allow the vices of the secessionists a better run. Adding secessionists (i. e., States) together to make a unified "World" can only be expected to produce effects procurable by mixing together, say, saltpetre with sulphur and charcoal: a nasty explosion. A nation acquires its dominant characteristics far more by what it excludes than by what it includes, and to this extent it is the embodied expression of the motive which is common to any other form of grouping. A group is formed in order to keep out the crowd: as in the case of club membership, of which it is precisely its powers of exclusion which distinguishes it from the fair-ground or the street. * * * *

The rationalist notion of an all-coercing "world-power" affords an excellent example of the floundering of cantatists. With all their desire to hit upon a fine-sounding justification for this strange new passion of great States for small ones, their wits seize upon all the fakes and omit the sole genuine one, i. e., that their lives in human nature an instinct which renders involuntary admiration to the small power putting its fortunes to the risk in order to rise: that there exists in men an involun-

tary admiration for the signs of growth. While it is a misleading folly to encourage small States to believe that they have any justification except such as they can assert at the sword's point, it is an equal folly not to calculate that a small State putting up a likely fight to ease its growing pains will exercise an enormous pull on the affections of the onlooker: not, of course, so much with the elderly party in authority whose interests its insurrectionary activity is flouting—but with the bystanders. Otherwise there is no justification for small States apart from the fact that their existence serves the interests of a greater by whose will alone they are enabled to live. * * * *

Small States might, indeed, be considered as the women in international polity. As with women, their status is not defined at first hand by their own intrinsic strength: they find their value in the fact that their existence chances to be useful to some other power who on this account accords them a courtesy status. Their "rights" are in virtue of the needs of the mightier, and are enjoyed by permission until such changes take place in the hang of things as may make their continued existence unnecessary: whereupon their "rights" shrivel to the dimensions of their virtual merits: to their might. For instance, the right of Denmark, Belgium, and Holland to exist lies in the fact that their existence as buffers is very useful to England. Their "rights" will dwindle very materially should Germany—to whom their existence is the reverse of a necessity—become the superior power: a tact which the King of the Belgians is doubtless very well aware.

* * * *

Accordingly, this creation of the "World" as supreme authority possesses little with which to attract men who have not the itch for airing theories in newspapers. They do not incline towards investing it with coercive powers strong enough to reduce all other powers to a state of feebleness at which resistance becomes impossible. With a man of Mr. Roosevelt's temperament matters will appear different. Mr. Roosevelt elects to put the nostrum "The World versus the Recalcitrant" under his patronage, and it is ill-luck that contemporary history should so blatantly thrust forward its refuting commentary.

* * * *

Mr. Roosevelt calls for a world-police which shall secure the peace of the world... to supplement and make effectual "a world agreement among all civilised and military powers to back righteousness by force." It should be "solemnly covenanted that if any nation refused to abide by the decision of such a court the others would draw the sword on behalf of peace and justice, and would unitedly coerce the recalcitrant nation." Now, what save the adhesion of the United States to the side of the Allies is missing from this picture of a world-agreement backing "righteousness by force" in the state of affairs existant to-day. The "World" minus the United States is coercing recalcitrant Germany: with what ultimate effect it still lies too far within the veil of the future to see. But if Mr. Roosevelt imagines that the stepping in of the United States would make the desired difference and change the existing bloody spectacle into one of friendly peace one would make bold to say that he is enormously mistaken, for the reason that though he calculates the number of heads he miscalculates human nature. The spectacle of Germany to-day facing her enemies—Belgium under her foot, France held with her teeth, her right arm holding Russia and her left England, while from far beyond she can catch the swelling sound of foes trooping from every continent, Japan, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, New Zealand—is tolerably heroic. Should the United States ally itself with Germany's enemies (if for the sake of illustration such a combination may be contemplated), then whether because of the fact that "Germany against the World" is too heroic a figure for human pride to tolerate her annihilation without a suffering from its own self-contempt; or whether because of a certain sympathy which always lurks in the under-world for the bravely beaten; or because of a new-born

jealously of the world-power itself when freed of its most serious rival—on account of some or all of these causes "Germany against the World" will prove that the World is a less formidable foe for Germany than the present combination of the Allies. The Alliance swollen with the adhesion of the United States would be far more likely to tip over on the right side for Germany than the existent Alliance. The disintegrating forces of the enormous collectivity—The World—would begin to dissolve out of it, and to its own detriment.

* * * *

The concept of the "World" in addition to that of "Justice" both proving illusory as forces towering high above national and Imperial gunpower, what is there existent over and above the State powerful enough to compel the pugnacious ones to fall back in contented mediocrity and love? Nothing save the guns of one State to silence the other. The query presents a problem for human ingenuity, and this latter has not failed of a solution for lack of making attempts of which the conception of the theocratic State, the State coerced by Moral Suasion: by the Ghostly Police: by the Inner Voice: by the God over All, remains alive and paramount.

* * * *

The vision of the King of Kings, whose vice-regent is Conscience, whose Ambassador is the Inner Voice, and whose ordinances are "Right," is the most audacious as well as the most subtle effort of human ingenuity: it is so ingenious that one might say "ought" to "work." It does work exquisitely and impressively in rhetoric. There is one voice only against it: that of experience. Unfortunately that voice is decisive: because it is in experience that the scheme is required to work. And therein the Omnipotent One is quite notably powerless. All experience has to tell of how the Omnipotent is worsted. His incursion into practical matters is therefore limited to an invocation of the "Great Name." He can scarcely attain even to the establishment of an identity. Men commandeer their enemies' God as their own devil, while in complementary return they may see their Own similarly installed among the enemy and Jehovah interchanges with Baal. A like impotence is to be observed of the Omnipotent's Ambassador—the Inner Voice. It fails to make sound just where in its own interests its self-assertion is vital. It makes itself heard just where it can matter little whether it speaks or remains

silent. Its purpose being to restrain the Napoleons, it yet flourishes only in the non-Napoleons: a Napoleon being by definition one constitutionally incapable of hearing an Inner Voice. The spell of two thousand years of Christianity has its testimony to add to the evidence of other theocracies: i.e., that its gospel is powerful as a working principle with the powerless. * * * *

Christians are not, however, to be dismayed because their creed works only by opposite in experience: if experience fails to embody the theocracy, so much the worse for experience. Experience, i.e., the tale of the world, the flesh and the devil—must be repudiated: ignored by a World-authority established in a Kingdom beyond the World. Christianity sets forward with un-diminished energies to win the "world" for Christ. Intelligently it makes a bid for men's hearts, intelligently, because there the egoistic desires which cause all wars are born. The Christ is for peace and desires born of hearts that are Christ's must faint at birth. By negating desire the rivalry born of the struggle to satisfy desire, is forestalled. In order to fight greatly one needs must desire greatly. At that low-toned level at which one has little enough of desire as to be ready to suffer all violence and yet to offer none, one has arrived at the crux of the disarmament question. A theocracy, therefore, of the Christian cast accepted by all the world is undoubtedly its one solution. Since Christianity besieges and seeks to conquer the Force whose power is above the State, prior to it, and has the shaping of all States and all secessions from States which make up "the World," Christ conquers the World: He silences the desires of men in which lurks the power which towers high above all States. These silenced, the warring cries which accompany the ever-fluctuating struggle of men with men and State with State will be hushed. The peace which indeed passeth all human understanding since it is the peace of the grave holds sway: a Thought without a thinker reigns silently over Nothingness. Disarmament more drastic than that which starts from the socket is accomplished: it has started from the heart. When the heart has been drugged no need remains for lopping off the arm. The dilemma has been evaded and all other dilemmas with it.... Otherwise Napoleonism reigns supreme: its efficient moderator is a world of Napoleons with whom desire is great and rampant.

VIEWS AND COMMENTS.

IT may seem a long way from gunpowder to politeness, which, for most people, is a synonym for civilised dealing. To explain civilisation without explaining politeness is, for them, to leave civilisation unexplained: as though one should consider the art of the sculptor to finish with the blasting of the block-marble, without concern for the chisel-work which actually constitutes its distinctive character. Yet blasting and chiselling are parts of the one process, though the one is prior to the other: and gunpowder and politeness stand in a like relation to civilisation. Before men became material suitable for polishing, for civilising, they needs must be reduced to maniable conditions by harsher methods of treatment: and it is primarily this prior reduction which separates the civilised from the barbarian.

* * * *

The barbarian is the outsider: the one which has not begun to be submitted to the polishing process of a specific order. Thus, there is nothing absolute about barbarian or civilised: always it is a matter of point of view: it is the outsider which is the "barbarian" from the outsider's point of view. No race can appear barbarians to themselves, because, from their point of view, they are insiders: that is, they have been submitted to the particular dominating power which governs them.

* * * *

Accordingly, it is not an accident which makes politeness an accompaniment of any strongly established class,

and boorishness a trait found, if found, in the dominated. Politeness is the progressive utilisation of the subjected material in the manner to which the nature of subjected material most readily lends itself. It is an intelligent adaptation of means to ends, once the great assumption of subjection has been accepted as a fact. Politeness is the smooth gloss which disguises precisely this fact: boorishness is its painful obtrusion through the smoothly-spread veneer. "To bury the hatchet," "to let sleeping dogs lie," is the sentiment which animates politeness and civility. The intent being to secure smooth working for the dominant and a soothed complacence in the dominated. It serves so well that it always achieves good repute among those who create good reputations, i. e., among the dominant, and so manages to get an overwhelming amount of prestige behind it. According as the sense of class remains sound among the dominant, its observance towards inferiors is regarded as de rigueur. The sentiment of noblesse oblige is one of the exigences of healthy dominant-class interests. Among equals politeness is merely a convenience of variable utility. For the dominated it presents a different aspect. Its exercise is based upon a soother complacence, an instinct for safety, whereas boorishness is a kicking against the pricks. It is disliked by the dominant because of its inconvenience, while it is despised by the dominated because of its futility. It is the harping on the existence of a sore which cannot be healed, but which may be forgotten or ignored: it is a refusal to accept with grace

what cannot be resisted with effect: it is the attribute of the "grouser" and "kill-joy," achieving all the pains but not the joys of the rebellious. The "little less," by which the boorish fall short of effectual reassertion, makes him just something less than even an unsuccessful rebel- it is merely a satisfaction of temper to no purpose, and it looks unintelligent because it succeeds only in defeating itself and proclaiming its defeat. President Kruger represents one thing: but General Beyers, might one say, represents something considerably less: they are the rebel and the boor. The difference is constituted by the difference in their chances of success.

* * * *

"Civilised dealing" with the dominated then is the extended application of the fact: that every condition of things has a better and a worse side according to the spirit in which one accepts it: the spirit which seeks to find in all things—compensations. With the dominant, on the other hand, it is the realisation that compensation for the dominated must be emphasised at all costs. For both, it is the utilisation of that dual aspect of appearances which makes them appear the right side upwards which ever way they fall. On this same duality, "good" manners are based as well as diplomacy and sound policy. For, if there are "Overs" there must be "Unders ": and each will distil from its condition its own comfort: diplomacy is the sensitive touch which feels for the fitting one to be brought into relief at the apposite time.

* * * *

It is a limited intelligence which can "tell the tale" only in one way. An intelligence has not grasped the simple elements of any situation until it can tell it forth in at least two; even the dual-telling process itself must be described dually as Duplicity or Diplomacy as the case needs. It is part of the weight of stupidity which seems to settle upon civilised States when they become afraid of the sound of the words "duplicity" and "diplomacy" while yet enlarging on the merits of civilisation. Such fear plainly argues that they have become the victims of the particular form of duplicity which constitutes civilisation—have lost their way, in fact, between one story and another. It seems that the cloak of civilisation, to secure to its wearers its advantages and yet to prove innocuous to them, must perforce carry a "barbarian" lining. The outcry for frankness from the upholders of civilisation is like the plaint of one who thinks he is bent on a good game of cards though he clamour for a preliminary exposure of the players' hands. Polite, civilised society means a society which tacitly disavows frankness. Civilisation deals in superficialities only, but is none the less important for that. Nine-tenths of the experiences of life work their course out along a surface of superficialities, and it is as absurd to depreciate superficialities as it would be to despise the surface of the earth: one can appreciate the value of the external crust and yet remain cheerfully aware that a few thousand miles within the crust conditions are distinctly different, and that if one is going to have to do with these interior conditions quite other preparations will need to be taken from those which are necessary for activities on the surface. So, politeness— the methods of civilisation—fare well enough within the limits of a fixed and accepted status: within the orbits that is of recognised State Orders, but where these themselves are in question the cry for "civil" methods is simply absurd.

* * * *

The evidence of the stupidity's existence among our over-civilised of to-day—the stupidity which is innocuous only when limited to the claque, but quite seriously undermining when it spreads to the dominant-class, is not confined to such niaiseries as "equal rights" as between the civil and military castes, or between men and women; it emerges, unconscious and unfaked, in complete unmistakability in the democratic demand for an "open" Foreign Policy: for a complete diplomatic explicitness. "Diplomatic explicitness" is an amusing combination if it is examined well enough: a direct contradiction, in fact, being an "unfolded folding-together." A para-

mount Imperial foreign policy, of necessity, is diplomatic, duplex, making great show of one set of cards in order to keep rival suspicions asleep as to the existence of those on which she actually relies for success. A "frank" statement of what an Imperial Foreign Office seeks to establish and maintain in its foreign relations would prick into activity just that sleeping pride of foreign nations which it has been the burden of its labours to lull. Imperial "frankness," far from avoiding war, would bring an Empire's rival buzzing about its ears with the animus of a disturbed nest of wasps. On the other hand, diplomatic "frankness" on the part of an ambitious "rising" State would find its analogy in, and would receive the treatment accorded to, the boorish-ness of the private individual. A rising nation requires to be actually "risen" before it can be diplomatically frank (i. e., dispense with diplomacy) with safety. Unless a nation is in a position to fight so irresistibly as to command a frankness to match its own, it must needs match guile with guile. Otherwise it is likely to find half the world arrayed against it: which is not a healthy sign, but one which argues crudeness and unfamiliarity with the ways of dominating power. In short, a nation's policy can safely be "frank" only when it is practically certain of the issue in reverting to that "extension of policy" which is an appeal to force, and there exist grounds for so many miscalculations in regard to the issues of force that even then diplomacy can be laid aside only with reserve. The susceptibilities of the stupid making up nine-tenths of Public Opinion: the diplomacy of those who own even the biggest battalions will need to keep a reverting eye to that. In these days of a world-extended Press particularly, though in war the sword is still supreme arbiter, the number of times it must strike can be enormously increased by effects due to scratches of the pen. If, for instance, Napoleon had been proclaimed world-ruler in advance of his insidious growth, his warned and alarmed foes would have scotched his career before Napoleonism had the chance to work itself out. But it became established long before the world was half aware what a Napoleon was. A preacclaimed Napoleon has a task before him infinitely larger than ever was Napoleon's.

D. M.