icials. That these individuals should possess only a limited
intelligence is almost inevitable. Existing for the purposes of war, they
naturally look at everything from an oblique and perverted point of view.
They regard nations, not as peaceful communities of citizens, but as
material to be worked up into armies. Their assumption is that war, being
an indelible feature in the history of our common humanity, must be
ceaselessly prepared for by the piling up of huge armaments and weapons of
destruction. Their invariable motto is that if you wish for peace you must
prepare for war--"si vis pacem, para bellum"--a notoriously false
apophthegm, because armaments are provocative, not soothing, and the man
who is a swash-buckler invites attack. It is needless to say that
thousands of military men do not belong to this category: no one dreads
war so much as the man who knows what it means. I am not speaking of
individuals, I am speaking of a particular caste, military officials in
the abstract, if you like to put it so, who, because their business is
war, have not the slightest idea what the pacific social development of a
people really means. Militarism is simply a one-sided, partial point of
view, and to enforce that upon a nation is as though a man with a
pronounced squint were to be accepted as a man of normal vision. We have
seen what it involves in Germany. In a less offensive form, however, it
exists in most states, and its root idea is usually that the civilian as
such belongs to a lower order of humanity, and is not so important to the
State as the officer who discharges vague and for the most part useless
functions in the War Office.[4] It is a swollen, over-developed militarism
that has got us into the present mess, and one of our earliest concerns,
when the storm is over, must be to put it into its proper place. Let him
who uses the sword perish by the sword.

[4] Thus it was the Military party in Bulgaria which drove her to the
disastrous second Balkan war, and the Military party in Austria which
insisted on the ultimatum to Servia.

DIPLOMACY

And I fear that there is another ancient piece of our international
strategy which has been found wanting. I approach with some hesitation the
subject of diplomacy, because it contains so many elements of value to a
state, and has given so many opportunities for active and original minds.
Its worst feature is that its operations have to be conducted in secret:
its best i