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prejudices and a sort of heated irascible stupidity, and everywhere
congested nations in inconvenient areas, slopping population and produce
into each other, annoying each other with tariffs, and every possible
commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies
that grew every year more portentous.

It is impossible now to estimate how much of the intellectual and
physical energy of the world was wasted in military preparation and
equipment, but it was an enormous proportion. Great Britain spent upon
army and navy money and capacity, that directed into the channels
of physical culture and education would have made the British the
aristocracy of the world. Her rulers could have kept the whole
population learning and exercising up to the age of eighteen and made
a broad-chested and intelligent man of every Bert Smallways in the
islands, had they given the resources they spent in war material to the
making of men. Instead of which they waggled flags at him until he was
fourteen, incited him to cheer, and then turned him out of school to
begin that career of private enterprise we have compactly recorded.
France achieved similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse;
Russia under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards
bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and countless
swarms of little Smallways. The Asiatic peoples had been forced in
self-defence into a like diversion of the new powers science had brought
them. On the eve of the outbreak of the war there were six great powers
in the world and a cluster of smaller ones, each armed to the teeth
and straining every nerve to get ahead of the others in deadliness
of equipment and military efficiency. The great powers were first the
United States, a nation addicted to commerce, but roused to military
necessities by the efforts of Germany to expand into South America, and
by the natural consequences of her own unwary annexations of land in the
very teeth of Japan. She maintained two immense fleets east and west,
and internally she was in violent conflict between Federal and State
governments upon the question of universal service in a defensive
militia. Next came the great alliance of Eastern Asia, a close-knit
coalescence of China and Japan, advancing with rapid strides year by
year to predominance in the world's affairs. Then the German alliance
still struggled to achieve its dream of imperial expansion, and its
imp