of their contents? No, replied Montaigne, he had not
read them, and he was not going to, because they were all wrong, and he
was right. And Montaigne spoke with this dogmatism because he realised
that he saw clearly that which they did not--the crookedness and
unsoundness of just those simple fundamental assumptions on which the
whole fantastic structure was based.

And so with all the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is
still defended. If the public as a whole had to follow all the
intricacies of those marvellous diplomatic combinations, the maze of our
foreign politics, to understand abstruse points of finance and
economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real
character of international relationship, why then public opinion would
go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound
opinion and instincts in that field depend upon nothing of the sort, but
upon the emergence of a few quite simple facts, which are indisputable
and self-evident, which stare us in the face, and which absolutely
disprove all the elaborate theories of the Bellicist statesmen.

For instance, if conquest and extension of territory is the main road of
moral and material progress, the fundamental need which sets up all
these rivalries and collisions, then it is the populations of the Great
States which should be the most enviable; the position of the Russian
should be more desirable than that of the Hollander; it is not. The
Austrian should be better off than the Switzer; he is not. If a nation's
wealth is really subject to military confiscation, and needs the defence
of military power, then the wealth of those small states should be
insecure indeed--and Belgian national stocks stand 20 points higher than
the German. If nations are rival units, then we should benefit by the
disappearance of our rivals--and if they disappeared, something like a
third of our population would starve to death. If the growth and
prosperity of rival nations threatens us, then we should be in far
greater danger of America to-day than we were some 50 years ago, when
the growth of that power disturbed the sleep of our statesmen (and when,
incidentally, we were just as much afraid of the growth of that power as
we are now afraid of the growth of Germany). If the growing power of
Russia compelled us to fight a great war in alliance with the Turk to
check her "advance on India," why are we now co-operating with Russia to