service--when I pointed out that that was an entirely different balance
from that of which Castlereagh had approved as a guarantee of peace. You
remember the Cheshire cat in _Alice in Wonderland_--an excellent
text-book for students of politics--and how the cat gradually faded away
leaving only its grin behind it to perplex and puzzle the observer. So
the body and the substance of Castlereagh's Balance of Power passed
away, and still men talk of the grin and look to the phrase to save them
from war. Whether to call them visionaries or the blind, I do not know.

MISCHIEVOUS HALLUCINATION

In either case, it is a mischievous hallucination; for the simple
Balance of Power between two great combinations is not only no guarantee
of peace, but the great begetter of fear, of the race for armaments, and
of war. Consider for a moment. If you want a balance, you want to have
it perfect. What is a perfect balance between two opposing weights or
forces? It is one which the addition of a feather-weight to either scale
will at once and completely upset. Now what will that equipoise produce?
The ease with which the balance may be destroyed will produce either on
one side the temptation to upset it, and on the other fear lest it be
upset, or fear on both sides at once. What indeed was it but this even
balance and consequent fear which produced the race for armaments? And
what does the race for armaments result in but in war? If we want war,
we need only aim at a Balance of Power, and it will do the rest. So far
from being a guarantee of peace, the Balance of Power is a sovereign
specific for precipitating war.

Of course, there are arguments for a Balance of Power. Plenty of them,
alas! though they are not often avowed. It produces other things than
war. For one thing, it makes fortunes for munition firms. For another,
it provides careers for those who have a taste for fighting or for
military pomp. Thirdly, in order to maintain armies and navies and
armaments, it keeps up taxation and diverts money from social,
educational, and other reforms which some people want to postpone.
Fourthly, it gratifies those who believe that force is the ultimate
sanction of order, and, by necessitating the maintenance of large forces
for defensive purposes, incidentally provides means for dealing with
domestic discontent. Fifthly, it panders to those who talk of prestige
and think that prestige depends upon the size of a nation's armaments.
For the