ect an elected government of the modern sort to be
guided by any far-reaching designs, it is constructed to get office and
keep office, not to do anything in office, the conditions of its
survival are to keep appearances up and taxes down,[36] and the care
and management of army and navy is quite outside its possibilities. The
military and naval professions in our typical modern State will subsist
very largely upon tradition, the ostensible government will interfere
with rather than direct them, and there will be no force in the entire
scheme to check the corrupting influence of a long peace, to insist upon
adequate exercises for the fighting organization or ensure an adequate
adaptation to the new and perpetually changing possibilities of untried
apparatus. Incapable but confident and energetic persons, having
political influence, will have been permitted to tamper with the various
arms of the service, the equipment will be largely devised to create an
impression of efficiency in times of peace in the minds of the general
voting public, and the really efficient soldiers will either have
fretted themselves out of the army or have been driven out as political
non-effectives, troublesome, innovating persons anxious to spend money
upon "fads." So armed, the New Democracy will blunder into war, and the
opening stage of the next great war will be the catastrophic breakdown
of the formal armies, shame and disasters, and a disorder of conflict
between more or less equally matched masses of stupefied, scared, and
infuriated people. Just how far the thing may rise from the value of an
alarming and edifying incident to a universal catastrophe, depends upon
the special nature of the conflict, but it does not alter the fact that
any considerable war is bound to be a bitter, appalling, highly
educational and constitution-shaking experience for the modern
democratic state.

Now, foreseeing this possibility, it is easy to step into the trap of
the Napoleonic precedent. One hastens to foretell that either with the
pressure of coming war, or in the hour of defeat, there will arise the
Man. He will be strong in action, epigrammatic in manner, personally
handsome and continually victorious. He will sweep aside parliaments and
demagogues, carry the nation to glory, reconstruct it as an empire, and
hold it together by circulating his profile and organizing further
successes. He will--I gather this from chance lights upon contemporary
antici