fact has
been hardly less true since his day, though latterly men have become
accustomed to think of peace as the normal, war as the abnormal or
exceptional, relation of states to one another. In the ancient world, as
late as the days of Roman conquest, a state of peace was the rare
exception among civilized states as well as barbarous tribes. But
Carthage, like her Phoenician mother-city, went on building up a mighty
commerce till Rome smote her down, and the Hellenic people, in its many
warring cities, went on producing noble poems and profound philosophical
speculations, and rearing majestic temples and adorning them with
incomparable works of sculpture, in the intervals of their fighting with
their neighbors of the same or other races. The case of the Greeks
proves that war and progress are compatible.

The capital instance of the association of war with the growth and
greatness of a state is found in Prussia. One may say that her history
is the source of the whole thesis and the basis of the whole argument.
It is a case of what, in the days when I learned logic at the University
of Oxford, we used to call the induction from a single instance.
Prussia, then a small state, began her upward march under the warlike
and successful prince whom her people call the Great Elector. Her next
long step to greatness was taken by Frederick II, again by favor of
successful warfare, though doubtless also by means of a highly
organized, and for those days very efficient, administration. Voltaire
said of Frederick's Prussia that its trade was war. Another war added to
her territory in 1814-15. Three successful wars--those of 1864, 1866,
and 1870-71--made her the nucleus of a united German nation and the
leading military power of the Old World.

Ever since those victories her industrial production, her commerce, and
her wealth have rapidly increased, while at the same time scientific
research has been prosecuted with the greatest vigor and on a scale
unprecedentedly large. These things were no doubt achieved during a
peace of forty-three years. But it was what one may call a belligerent
peace, full of thoughts of war and preparations for war. There is no
denying that the national spirit has been carried to a high point of
pride, energy, and self-confidence, which have stimulated effort in all
directions and secured extraordinary efficiency in civil as well as in
military administration. Here, then, is an instance in which a state h