The Great Events by Famous Historians

Or do we believe nothing of the sort? Is our real opinion that these things at bottom don't matter—or matter so little that for the sake of robbing the squalid belongings of a few Arab tribes, or playing some mean game of party politics, they can be set aside in a whoop of "patriotism"?

Our press waxes indignant in this particular case, and that is the end of it. But we do not see that we are to blame, that it is all the outcome of a conception of politics which we are forever ready to do our part to defend, to do daily our part to uphold.

And those of us who try in our feeble way to protest against this conception of politics and patriotism, where everything stands on its head; where the large is made to appear the great, and the great is made to appear the small, are derided as sentimentalists, Utopians. As though anything could be more sentimental, more divorced from the sense of reality, than the principles which lead us to a condition of things like these; as though anything could be more wildly, burlesquely Utopian than the idea that efforts of the kind that the Italian people are now making, the energy they are now spending, could ever achieve anything of worth.

Is it not time that the man in the street, verily, I believe, less deluded by diplomatic jargon than his betters, less the slave of an obsolete phraseology, insisted that the experts in the high places acquired some sense of the reality of things, of proportion, some sense of figures, a little knowledge of industrial history, of the real processes of human cooperation?

At present Europe is quite indifferent to Italy's behavior. The Chancelleries, which will go to enormous trouble and take enormous risks and concoct alliances and counter-alliances when there is territory to be seized, remain cold when crimes of this sort are committed. And they remain cold because they believe that Turkey alone is concerned. They do not see that Italy has attacked not Turkey, but Europe; that we, more than Turkey, will pay the broken pots.

And there is a further reason: We still believe in these piracies; we believe they pay and that we may get our turn at some "swag" to-morrow. France is envied for her possession of Morocco; Germany for her increased authority over some pestilential African swamps. But when we realize that in these international burglaries there is no "swag," that the whole thing is an illusion, that there are huge costs but no reward, we shall be on the road to a better tradition, which, while it may not give us international policing, may do better still—render the policing unnecessary. For when we have realized that the game is not worth the candle, when no one desires to commit aggression, the competition in armaments will have become a bad nightmare of the past.

SIR MAX WAECHTER

It is generally admitted that the present condition of Europe is highly unsatisfactory. To any close observer it must be evident that Europe, as a whole, is gradually losing its position in the world. Other nations which are rapidly coming to the front will, in course of time, displace the European, unless the latter can pull themselves together and abandon the vicious system which now handicaps them In the economic rivalry of nations.

The cause of this comparative decline is, in my opinion, to be found in the fact that all the European countries are arming against one another, either for defense, or for aggression, for the attack is frequently the best form of defense. The motive for these excessive armaments can clearly be found in the jealousy and mistrust existing among the nations of Europe. Europe is spending on armaments something like four hundred million pounds sterling per year, and there is a tendency to increase this tremendous expenditure. In order to bring the magnitude of this sacrifice more vividly before the reader, let us assume that a European war is not likely to occur more frequently than about every thirty years. We then find that the incredible sum of twelve thousand million pounds sterling has been spent in peace in preparation for this war, a sum which greatly exceeds the total of all the European state debts. Such stupendous sums can not be raised without imposing crushing taxation, and without neglecting the other duties of the state, such as education, scientific research, and social reform.