tradeless foreigners,
exporting everything and importing nothing, is obviously outside reason
altogether. The inexorable doom of these governments based on the grey,
is to foster enmity between people and people. Even their alliances are
but sacrifices to intenser antagonisms. And the phases of the democratic
sequence are simple and sure. Forced on by a relentless competition, the
tone of the outcries will become fiercer and fiercer; the occasions of
excitement, the perilous moments, the ingenuities of annoyance, more and
more dramatic,--from the mere emptiness and disorder of the general
mind! Jealousies and anti-foreign enactments, tariff manipulations and
commercial embitterment, destructive, foolish, exasperating obstructions
that benefit no human being, will minister to this craving without
completely allaying it. Nearer, and ever nearer, the politicians of the
coming times will force one another towards the verge, not because they
want to go over it, not because any one wants to go over it, but because
they are, by their very nature, compelled to go that way, because to go
in any other direction is to break up and lose power. And, consequently,
the final development of the democratic system, so far as intrinsic
forces go, will be, not the rule of the boss, nor the rule of the trust,
nor the rule of the newspaper; no rule, indeed, but international
rivalry, international competition, international exasperation and
hostility, and at last--irresistible and overwhelming--the definite
establishment of the rule of that most stern and educational of all
masters--_War_.

At this point there opens a tempting path, and along it historical
precedents, like a forest of notice-boards, urge us to go. At the end of
the vista poses the figure of Napoleon with "Caesarism" written beneath
it. Disregarding certain alien considerations for a time, assuming the
free working out of democracy to its conclusion, we perceive that, in
the case of our generalized state, the party machine, together with the
nation entrusted to it, must necessarily be forced into passionate
national war. But, having blundered into war, the party machine will
have an air of having accomplished its destiny. A party machine or a
popular government is surely as likely a thing to cause a big disorder
of war and as unlikely a thing to conduct it, as the wit of man, working
solely to that end, could ever have devised. I have already pointed out
why we can never exp