ation.
Improvements in the technology of arms and armament worked to the like
effect, of setting the peace of any community on an increasingly
precarious footing, through the advantage which this new technology gave
to a ready equipment and a rapid mobilisation. The new state of the
industrial arts serviceable for warlike enterprise put an increasingly
heavy premium on readiness for offense or defense, but more particularly
it all worked increasingly to the advantage of the offensive. It put the
Fabian strategy out of date, and led to the doctrine of a defensive
offense.

Gradually it came true, with the continued advance in those industrial
arts that lend themselves to strategic uses, and it came also to be
realised, that no corner of the earth was any longer secure by mere
favor of distance and natural difficulty, from eventual aggression at
the hands of any provident and adventurous assailant,--even by help of a
modicum of defensive precaution. The fear of aggression then came
definitively to take the place of international good-will and became the
chief motive in public policy, so fast and so far as the state of the
industrial arts continued to incline the balance of advantage to the
side of the aggressor. All of which served greatly to strengthen the
hands of those statesmen who, by interest or temperament, were inclined
to imperialistic enterprise. Since that period all armament has
conventionally been accounted defensive, and all statesmen have
professed that the common defense is their chief concern. Professedly
all armament has been designed to keep the peace; so much of a shadow of
the peaceable bias there still stands over.

Throughout this latest phase of modern civilisation the avowed fear of
aggression has served as apology, possibly as provocation in fact, to
national armaments; and throughout the same period any analysis of the
situation will finally run the chain of fear back to Prussia as the
putative or actual, center of disturbance and apprehension. No doubt,
Prussian armament has taken the lead and forced the pace among the
nations of Christendom; but the Prussian policy, too, has been
diligently covered with the same decorous plea of needful provision for
the common defense and an unremitting solicitude for international
peace,--to which has been added the canny afterthought of the "defensive
offense."

It is characteristic of this era of armed peace that in all these
extensive preparations for