r that it was in danger of dominating the whole Continent, then
Britain might find herself faced by an overwhelming power with which she
would be unable to deal. To prevent this she joined the weaker group.
Thus Britain intervened in Continental politics against Napoleon as she
has intervened today against the Kaiser.

But this policy is merely a perpetuation on a larger scale of the
principle of "each being stronger than the other." Military power, in
any case, is a thing very difficult to estimate; an apparently weaker
group or nation has often proved, in fact, to be the stronger, so that
there is a desire on the part of both sides to give the benefit of the
doubt to themselves. Thus the natural and latent effort to be strongest
is obviously fatal to any "balance." Neither side, in fact, desires a
balance; each desires to have the balance tilted in its favor. This sets
up a perpetual tendency toward rearrangement, and regroupings and
reshufflings in these international alliances sometimes take place with
extraordinary and startling rapidity, as in the case of the Balkan
States.

It is already illustrated in the present war; Italy has broken away from
a definite and formal alliance which every one supposed would range her
on the German side. There is at least a possibility that she may finally
come down upon the Anglo-Franco-Russian side. You have Japan, which
little more than a decade ago was fighting bitterly against Russia,
today ranged upon the side of Russia.

The position of Russia is still more startling. In the struggles of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Britain was almost always on
the side of Russia; then for two generations she was taught that any
increase of the power of Russia was a particularly dangerous menace.
That once more was a decade ago suddenly changed, and Britain is now
fighting to increase both relatively and absolutely the power of a
country which her last war on the Continent was fought to check. The war
before that which Great Britain fought upon the Continent was fought in
alliance with Germans against the power of France. As to the Austrians,
whom Britain is now fighting, they were for many years her faithful
allies. So it is very nearly true to say of nearly all the combatants
respectively that they have no enemy today that was not, historically
speaking, quite recently an ally, and not an ally today that was not in
the recent past an enemy.

These combinations, therefo