y lucky; the
forecast of an alliance of the Central Empires, the opening campaign
through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British Expeditionary
Force were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the
reality has happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of
the matter. One happy hit (in Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which
the writer may congratulate himself, is the forecast that under modern
conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general to emerge
to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either
side. There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the
scientific corps muttering, 'These old fools,' exactly as it is here
foretold.

These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far
outnumber the hits. It is the main thesis which is still of interest
now; the thesis that because of the development of scientific knowledge,
separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no longer
possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system
is to heap disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy
our race altogether. The remaining interest of this book now is the
sustained validity of this thesis and the discussion of the possible
ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic of sanity
to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I
have represented the native common sense of the French mind and of
the English mind--for manifestly King Egbert is meant to be 'God's
Englishman'--leading mankind towards a bold and resolute effort of
salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school book
footnotes say, compare to-day's newspaper. Instead of a frank and
honourable gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and
Frenchman Russian, brothers in their offences and in their disaster,
upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the other end of
Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the
United States, Russia, and most of the 'subject peoples' of the world),
meeting obscurely amidst a world-wide disregard to make impotent
gestures at the leading problems of the debacle. Either the disaster has
not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough to inflict the
necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as
the world