s played in the seventeenth century by the Quakers. In the name of the
Bible and their own consciences, the Quakers refused to recognize the
right of any secular authority to compel them to worship or to fight;
they gained what they struggled for, and now all men honour their
memories. In the name of justice and human fraternity, the
anti-militarists are to-day taking the like course and suffering the
like penalties. To-morrow, they also will be revered as heroes and
martyrs.

(6) _The Over-growth of Armaments._ The hostile forces so far enumerated
have converged slowly on to war from such various directions that they
may be said to have surrounded and isolated it; its ultimate surrender
can only be a matter of time. Of late, however, a new factor has
appeared, of so urgent a character that it is fast rendering the
question of the abolition of war acute: the over-growth of armaments.
This is, practically, a modern factor in the situation, and while it is,
on the surface, a luxury due to the large surplus of wealth in great
modern states, it is also, if we look a little deeper, intimately
connected with that decay of the warlike spirit due to selective
breeding. It is the weak and timid woman who looks nervously under the
bed for the burglar who is the last person she really desires to meet,
and it is old, rich, and unwarlike nations which take the lead in
laboriously protecting themselves against enemies of whom there is no
sign in any quarter. Within the last half-century only have the nations
of the world begun to compete with each other in this timorous and
costly rivalry. In the warlike days of old, armaments in time of peace
consisted in little more than solid walls for defence, a supply of
weapons stored away here and there, sometimes in a room attached to the
parish church, and occasional martial exercises with the sword or the
bow, which were little more than an amusement. The true fighting man
trusted to his own strong right arm rather than to armaments, and
considered that he was himself a match for any half-dozen of the enemy.
Even in actual time of war it was often difficult to find either zeal or
money to supply the munitions of war. The _Diary_ of the industrious
Pepys, who achieved so much for the English navy, shows that the care of
the country's ships mainly depended on a few unimportant officials who
had the greatest trouble in the world to secure attention to the most
urgent and immediate needs.

A