none of which can be missing, the condition
being something complex and not readily analyzable, at any given time.
In addition to these strains events must take place which, in all
their appearances, are fortuitous.

One might argue from this that the cure of war consists in eternal
watchfulness to see that the match does not touch the powder, that we
must watch these events that precipitate wars and safeguard peoples
from being affected by them. This, of course, is more or less the
method of diplomacy; to some minds the league of nations is a device
for doing this on a larger and more systematic scale. But when we
study history and see what these war-causing incidents are, how
numerous and how variable, we can see that diplomacy and statesmanship
undertake an impossible task when they try to steer the world along
its narrow historical course, with only historical landmarks for
guides.

The war that is so vividly in mind now furnishes us with an
illustration of the complexity of the causes of war, and allows us to
see clearly contrasting views of the causal factors in great wars in
general. We see here a closely fitting series of events, each in
itself having but little reference to the great crisis, all fitting
together, and for want of any one of which, if one takes the purely
historical view, we might suppose the war would never have happened,
or might have been postponed indefinitely. If Venezelos, to go back no
further than that, had remained in Crete and had been content to be an
island politician, would not the course of events in the Balkans have
been very different? Out of his course came events which no one could
have foreseen, but which, without similar actions on the part of
individuals producing other links in the chain, would not have taken
place. If some diplomat or some foreign office had made a decision
slightly different from what was actually decided; if the three
emperors had had a little more reliable information about one
another; if the statisticians of the German service had computed a
little better England's resources, and had put the moral factor into
the sum--would the war have happened at all?

In this direction, of course, lies the chaos of history and its
madness--and also its philosophy. We may be driven on the one hand to
think of all history as a matter of the chance relations of
individuals and of detached particular events, having significance as
a series but never planned or contr