untry a great and growing body of
energetic and inventive men was busied either for offensive or defensive
ends, in elaborating the apparatus of war, until the accumulating
tensions should reach the breaking-point. Each power sought to keep its
preparations secret, to hold new weapons in reserve, to anticipate and
learn the preparations of its rivals. The feeling of danger from fresh
discoveries affected the patriotic imagination of every people in the
world. Now it was rumoured the British had an overwhelming gun, now the
French an invincible rifle, now the Japanese a new explosive, now the
Americans a submarine that would drive every ironclad from the seas.
Each time there would be a war panic.

The strength and heart of the nations was given to the thought of war,
and yet the mass of their citizens was a teeming democracy as heedless
of and unfitted for fighting, mentally, morally, physically, as any
population has ever been--or, one ventures to add, could ever be. That
was the paradox of the time. It was a period altogether unique in
the world's history. The apparatus of warfare, the art and method of
fighting, changed absolutely every dozen years in a stupendous progress
towards perfection, and people grew less and less warlike, and there was
no war.

And then at last it came. It came as a surprise to all the world because
its real causes were hidden. Relations were strained between Germany
and the United States because of the intense exasperation of a tariff
conflict and the ambiguous attitude of the former power towards the
Monroe Doctrine, and they were strained between the United States and
Japan because of the perennial citizenship question. But in both cases
these were standing causes of offence. The real deciding cause, it is
now known, was the perfecting of the Pforzheim engine by Germany and the
consequent possibility of a rapid and entirely practicable airship.
At that time Germany was by far the most efficient power in the world,
better organised for swift and secret action, better equipped with the
resources of modern science, and with her official and administrative
classes at a higher level of education and training. These things she
knew, and she exaggerated that knowledge to the pitch of contempt for
the secret counsels of her neighbours. It may be that with the habit of
self-confidence her spying upon them had grown less thorough. Moreover,
she had a tradition of unsentimental and unscrupulous act