of us would be threatened and the whole problem. would be solved.

At the bottom of the problem of war, of the need for preparing for it, of defence, is the belief in the effectiveness of force as a means of achieving the ends, moral and material, for which men strive; the belief that in certain cases it is the only means or the best means of achieving them. If we are really threatened by Japan or have been in the past by England or Germany, it is because those countries believe or believed that by war upon us they could satisfy certain material or moral needs, or promote certain national interests, or vindicate certain rights. If we desire to intervene in the Mexican embroglio, it is because we believe that the interest of civilization could. most

* The following, which is from an article in the current "National Review" (London) is indicative of accepted thought on these problems:

Germany must expand. Every year an extra million babies are crying out for more room, and as the expansion of Germany by peaceful means seems impossible Germany can only provide for those babies at the cost of potential foes, and France is one of them.

A vanquished France might give Germany all she wants. The immense colonial possessions of France present a tantalizing and provoking temptation to German cupidity, which, it cannot be too often repeated, is not mere envious greed but stern necessity. The same struggle for life and space which more than a thousand years ago drove one Teutonic wave after another across the Rhine and the Alps is now once more a great compelling force. Colonies fit to receive the German surplus population are the greatest need of Germany. This aspect of the case may be all very sad and wicked, but it is true. * * Herein lies the temptation and the danger. Herein, too, lies the ceaseless and ruinous struggle of armaments, and herein for France lies the dire necessity of linking her foreign policy with that of powerful allies.

promptly and effectively be promoted by the employment of our force.

And of course if we admit that force is effective to promote vital needs, as well as the right, even arbitration does not solve the question since no court can ask one litigant to commit suicide in favour of the other. If the accepted view of the necessary economic and industrial rivalry of nations is just, we are faced by a condition in which one nation must either see its children of the future starve or suffer; or must obtain from other nations concessions to grant which they regard as equally disastrous to their children of the future. We are faced, that is, by what the Greek author 2000 years since declared to be the great tragedy of human life-the conflict of two rights.

So I say we can lay down as a premise upon which we are all agreed that the problem of war is the problem of the effectiveness of force to promote the ends which we desire and which we believe we are entitled to promote, ends which are right.

But the question of the effectiveness of force, of the place of force in human relations, is obviously one of the fundamental questions at the base of all problems connected with the organization of human society. Law is simply a question of determining in what conditions the force of the state shall be exercised, conditions which we define by our Magna Charta, habeas corpus and the rest of it. The development of popular government from what the political schoolmen call "status to contract" is but the story of the modification of the conditions in which force is used, as is indeed all those problems which grow out of the relation of the citizen to the government, that is to society.

The same problem of the place of force is the problem of private property, a question of the conditions in which the force of the community shall be invoked by the individual for determining the respective position of the two parties. Allied with that is the problem of State Socialism, the use of the force of the state for determining the conditions of the distribution. of wealth. Protectionism is the use of the force of the state for controlling the current of trade. It is, of course, more obvious that such questions as revolutionary syndicalism, "direct action," dynamitard Trade Unionism are just problems of the effectiveness of force and the right to use it in social and industrial adjustments. Problems of jurisprudence and criminology, like the effect of penal laws, are equally questions of the effectiveness of force in a somewhat different sphere.

Indeed, as we have seen, the question of the place of force, of authority, was at the bottom of one of the greatest of all the acts in our human drama, that correction of perception, that development of what Lecky calls human realizations, which is neither the Rennaissance nor the Reformation, but is nevertheless a quite definite dividing line. On one side of that line you have the Europe of religious wars and the Inquisition and the massacres of St. Bartholomew, and on the other side a certain measure of security in our spiritual and intellectual possessions, and the liberations which give us the modern world. That movement or change was in reality nothing but a readjustment of our conception of the place of force in one group of affairsthe religious affairs.

I have attempted to show just how and why current

conceptions as to the relation of military force in nations to the promotion of their well being are in large part fundamentally false (1) and in what manner a readjustment of those conceptions may lead to clearer vision as to social processes in all fields (2). It is not mainly the more visible evils of war and armaments which give the greatest value to the study of the accepted theories of international polity, but the fact that the fundamental misunderstanding of any large human issue involves the misunderstanding in some degree of all human relations. The continued justification of the military form of international society has involved perpetuating a political philosophy which misrepresents the basic principles of human association and co-operation, a distortion which has widespread moral results as affecting not merely the form of our social structures within the nation, but our relative valuation of the qualities of human character; and large material results in diminishing the effectiveness of that exploitation of the earth by which we live.

If what I am urging with reference to international politics is broadly true, then in much of our general political action, not merely with reference to one group in its relation to another group, but also to a large extent with reference to the relations of men individually to other men, we have misunderstood some of the fundamental principles which must govern their life in communities in order to insure the best conditions for them: misunderstanding the mechanism of human

(1) "The Great Illusion," Putnam's, N. Y. (2) "Arms and Industry," Putnam's, N. Y.

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society, misreading the means by which we wring our substance from the earth, failing to seize the arrangement most advantageous for the purpose of carrying on our war with nature.

It is not a question for the moment where the conclusions upon which the study I have in mind may point-though I want you to believe that no political, religious, national, or sentimental prepossessions of any kind have weighed in my own case, and that I would as readily have drawn, if the facts had pointed thereto, exactly contrary conclusions, and by no means have been frightened therefrom by the rattle of the sabre-but, if you are concerned at all with the large issues I have indicated, I do not think you can afford to ignore the bearing of the forces in question.

Nor should you conclude from the illustrations that I have just employed, and the emphasis I have laid on the importance of the indirect effects of the principles I want you to investigate, that their direct effect is insignificant. However much we may be divided in other aspects of the problem of war and national defense, we are all accustomed to say, whether we believe it or not, that those problems are both morally and materially the most important of our generation. And yet we find that in this problem we are not facing facts; that we proceed habitually upon assumptions which analysis does not support, that we are ignoring changes which have taken place, and basing our action daily upon conceptions which have become obsolete, upon unrealities, sometimes upon shams.

And will you note this: that though you may not draw the conclusions which I draw, though you regard

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