n maintenance or luxury.
Moreover, all the foreign money invested in the belligerent country is
depreciated and imperilled. The international voice of trade and finance
is, therefore, to-day mainly on the side of peace.

It must be added that this voice is not, as it might seem, a selfish
voice only. It is justifiable not only in immediate international
interests, but even in the ultimate interests of the belligerent
country, and not less so if that country should prove victorious. So far
as business and money are concerned, a country gains nothing by a
successful war, even though that war involves the acquisition of immense
new provinces; after a great war a conquered country may possess more
financial stability than its conqueror, and both may stand lower in this
respect than some other country which is internationally guaranteed
against war. Such points as these have of late been ably argued by
Norman Angell in his remarkable book, _The Great Illusion_, and for the
most part convincingly illustrated.[225] As was long since said, the
ancients cried, _Vae victis_! We have learnt to cry, _Vae victoribus_!

It may, indeed, be added that the general tendency of war--putting aside
peoples altogether lacking in stamina--is to moralize the conquered and
to demoralise the conquerors. This effect is seen alike on the material
and the spiritual sides. Conquest brings self-conceit and intolerance,
the reckless inflation and dissipation of energies. Defeat brings
prudence and concentration; it ennobles and fortifies. All the glorious
victories of the first Napoleon achieved less for France than the
crushing defeat of the third Napoleon. The triumphs left enfeeblement;
the defeat acted as a strong tonic which is still working beneficently
to-day. The corresponding reverse process has been at work in Germany:
the German soil that Napoleon ploughed yielded a Moltke and a
Bismarck,[226] while to-day, however mistakenly, the German Press is
crying out that only another war--it ought in honesty to say an
unsuccessful war--can restore the nation's flaccid muscle. It is yet
too early to see the results of the Russo-Japanese War, but already
there are signs that by industrial overstrain and the repression of
individual thought Japan is threatening to enfeeble the physique and to
destroy the high spirit of the indomitable men to whom she owed her
triumph.

(3) _The Decreasing Pressure of Population._ It was at one time commonly
said, an