very difficult state of things prevails to-day. The existence of a
party having for its watchword the cry for retrenchment and economy is
scarcely possible in a modern state. All the leading political parties
in every great state--if we leave aside the party of Labour--are equally
eager to pile up the expenditure on armaments. It is the boast of each
party, not that it spends less, but more, than its rivals on this source
of expenditure, now the chief in every large state. Moreover, every new
step in expenditure involves a still further step; each new improvement
in attack or defence must immediately be answered by corresponding or
better improvements on the part of rival powers, if they are not to be
outclassed. Every year these moves and counter-moves necessarily become
more extensive, more complex, more costly; while each counter-move
involves the obsolescence of the improvements achieved by the previous
move, so that the waste of energy and money keeps pace with the
expenditure. It is well recognized that there is absolutely no possible
limit to this process and its constantly increasing acceleration.

There is no need to illustrate this point, for it is familiar to all.
Any newspaper will furnish facts and figures vividly exemplifying some
aspect of the matter. For while only a handful of persons in any country
are sincerely anxious under present conditions to reduce the colossal
sums every year wasted on the unproductive work of armament; an
increasing interest in the matter testifies to a vague alarm and anxiety
concerning the ultimate issue. For it is felt that an inevitable crisis
lies at the end of the path down which the nations are now moving.

Thus, from this point of view, the end of war is being attained by a
process radically opposite to that by which in the social as well as in
the physical organism ancient structures and functions are outgrown. The
usual process is a gradual recession to a merely vestigial state. But
here what may perhaps be the same ultimate result is being reached by
the more alarming method of over-inflation and threatening collapse. It
is an alarming process because those huge and heavily armed monsters of
primeval days who furnish the zoological types corresponding to our
modern over-armed states, themselves died out from the world when their
unwieldy armament had reached its final point of expansion. Will our own
modern states, one wonders, more fortunately succeed in escaping fro