quate provision were
made (and it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to make it) to
prevent a nation from preparing for war during the year's wait, the
countries with the largest resources, such as Great Britain, the United
States and Russia, would secure an enormous advantage, while nations
like Germany and Japan would lose. An event in the very recent past
illustrates this point. On August 1, 1914 the German Secretary of
State intimated to the British Ambassador that a failure on the part of
Russia to demobilise would cause Germany to declare instant war.
"Russia had said that her mobilisation did not necessarily imply war,
and that she could perfectly well remain mobilised for months without
making war. This was not the case with Germany. She had the speed and
Russia had the numbers, and the safety of the German Empire forbade
that Germany should allow Russia time to bring up masses of troops from
all parts of her wide dominions."[5] In other words, for Germany to
give up her greater speed of mobilisation would be to destroy her
advantage while assuring that of Russia. Actually, under present
circumstances, such a proposal would tend to preserve the _status quo_
and to aid the satisfied nations. In practice it would take from the
dissatisfied nations the power to alter arrangements, which they feel
are unjust.

{230}

Most of these plans, a federation of nations, a progressive
disarmament, a wider application of the principle of arbitration, and a
League to Enforce Peace, have elements of value, once they are divorced
from purely static conceptions and are united with proposals to effect
some form of progressive adjustment of nations to each other and to the
world. In this effort at adjustment lies the real problem of securing
international peace. So long as the nations have conflicting economic
interests so wide and deep as to make their surrender perilous to the
national future, so long will they find some way to escape from the
restraints of peace. They will drive their armies through any compact
or agreement, adverse to their economic interests, and in the process
will smash whatever machinery has been created for establishing peace.
A dynamic pacifism, therefore, must take into account this factor of
the constantly changing, balancing, opposing economic needs of rival
nations. It must devise not only some rudimentary form of
international government but also arrangements by which the things for