e on us by
smashing this or that particular Power is like trying to alter the
pressure of the ocean by dipping up a bucket of water from the North Sea
and pouring it into the Bay of Biscay.

I purposely omit more easterly supposings as to what victorious Russia
might do. But a noble emancipation of Poland and Finland at her own
expense, and of Bosnia and Harzegovina at Austria's, might easily
suggest to our nervous Militarists that a passion for the freedom of
Egypt and India might seize her, and remind her that we were Japan's
ally in the day of Russia's humiliation in Manchuria. So there at once
is your Balance of Power problem in Asia enormously aggravated by
throwing Germany out of the anti-Russian scale and grinding her to
powder. Even in North Africa--but enough is enough. You can _durchhauen_
your way out of the frying pan, but only into the fire. Better take
Nietzsche's brave advice, and make it your point of honour to "live
dangerously." History shews that it is often the way to live long.

*Learning Nothing: Forgetting Everything.*

But let me test the Militarist theory, not by a hypothetical future, but
by the accomplished and irrevocable past. Is it true that nations must
conquer or go under, and that military conquest means prosperity and
power for the victor and annihilation for the vanquished? I have already
alluded in passing to the fact that Austria has been beaten repeatedly:
by France, by Italy, by Germany, almost by everybody who has thought it
worth while to have a whack at her; and yet she is one of the Great
Powers; and her alliance has been sought by invincible Germany. France
was beaten by Germany in 1870 with a completeness that seemed
impossible; yet France has since enlarged her territory whilst Germany
is still pleading in vain for a place in the sun. Russia was beaten by
the Japanese in Manchuria on a scale that made an end forever of the old
notion that the West is the natural military superior of the East; yet
it is the terror of Russia that has driven Germany into her present
desperate onslaught on France; and it is the Russian alliance on which
France and England are depending for their assurance of ultimate
success. We ourselves confess that the military efficiency with which we
have so astonished the Germans is the effect, not of Waterloo and
Inkerman, but of the drubbing we got from the Boers, who we aid probably
have beaten us if we had been anything like their own size. Greece