pations--codify everything, rejuvenate the papacy, or, at any
rate, galvanize Christianity, organize learning in meek intriguing
academies of little men, and prescribe a wonderful educational system.
The grateful nations will once more deify a lucky and aggressive
egotism.... And there the vision loses breath.

Nothing of the sort is going to happen, or, at any rate, if it happens,
it will happen as an interlude, as no necessary part in the general
progress of the human drama. The world is no more to be recast by chance
individuals than a city is to be lit by sky rockets. The purpose of
things emerges upon spacious issues, and the day of individual leaders
is past. The analogies and precedents that lead one to forecast the
coming of military one-man-dominions, the coming of such other parodies
of Caesar's career as that misapplied, and speedily futile chess
champion, Napoleon I. contrived, are false. They are false because they
ignore two correlated things; first, the steady development of a new and
quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the
expansion of science and mechanism, and secondly, the absolute
revolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringing
about. This latter consideration the next chapter will expand, but here,
in the interests of this discussion, we may in general terms anticipate
its gist. War in the past has been a thing entirely different in its
nature from what war, with the apparatus of the future, will be--it has
been showy, dramatic, emotional, and restricted; war in the future will
be none of these things. War in the past was a thing of days and
heroisms; battles and campaigns rested in the hand of the great
commander, he stood out against the sky, picturesquely on horseback,
visibly controlling it all. War in the future will be a question of
preparation, of long years of foresight and disciplined imagination,
there will be no decisive victory, but a vast diffusion of conflict--it
will depend less and less on controlling personalities and driving
emotions, and more and more upon the intelligence and personal quality
of a great number of skilled men. All this the next chapter will expand.
And either before or after, but, at any rate, in the shadow of war, it
will become apparent, perhaps even suddenly, that the whole apparatus of
power in the country is in the hands of a new class of intelligent and
scientifically-educated men. They will probably, under the dev