That order of things which is known on its political and civil side as the feudal system, together with that era of the dynastic States which succeeds the feudal age technically so called, was, on its industrial or technological side, a system of trained man-power organised on a plan of subordination of man to man. On the whole, the scheme and logic of that life, whether in its political (warlike) or its industrial doings, whether in war or peace, runs on terms of personal capacity, proficiency and relations. The organisation of the forces engaged and the constraining rules according to which this organisation worked, were of the nature of personal relations, and the impersonal factors in the case were taken for granted. Politics and war were a field for personal valor, force and cunning, in practical effect a field for personal force and fraud. Industry was a field in which the routine of life, and its outcome, turned on "the skill, dexterity and judgment of the individual workman," in the words of Adam Smith.
The feudal age passed, being done to death by handicraft industry, commercial traffic, gunpowder, and the state-making politicians. But the political States of the statemakers, the dynastic States as they may well be called, continued the conduct of political life on the personal plane of rivalry and jealousy between dynasties and between their States; and in spite of gunpowder and the new military engineering, warfare continued also to be, in the main and characteristically, a field in which man-power and personal qualities decided the outcome, by virtue of personal "skill, dexterity and judgment." Meantime industry and its technology by insensible degrees underwent a change in the direction of impersonalisation, particularly in those countries in which state-making and its warlike enterprise had ceased, or were ceasing, to be the chief interests and the controlling preconception of the people.
The logic of the new, mechanical industry which has supplanted handicraft in these countries, is a mechanistic logic, which proceeds in terms of matter-of-fact strains, masses, velocities, and the like, instead of the "skill, dexterity and judgment" of personal agents. The new industry does not dispense with the personal agencies, nor can it even be said to minimise the need of skill, dexterity and judgment in the personal agents employed, but it does take them and their attributes for granted as in some sort a foregone premise to its main argument. The logic of the handicraft system took the impersonal agencies for granted; the machine industry takes the skill, dexterity and judgment of the workmen for granted. The processes of thought, and therefore the consistent habitual discipline, of the former ran in terms of the personal agents engaged, and of the personal relations of discretion, control and
subordination necessary to the work; whereas the mechanistic logic of the modern technology, more and more consistently, runs in terms of the impersonal forces engaged, and inculcates an habitual predilection for matter-of-fact statement, and an habitual preconception that the findings of material science alone are conclusive.
In those nations that have made up the advance guard of Western civilisation in its movement out of feudalism, the disintegrating effect of this matter-of-fact animus inculcated by the later state of the industrial arts has apparently acted effectively, in some degree, to discredit those preconceptions of personal discrimination on which dynastic rule is founded. But in no case has the discipline of this mechanistic technology yet wrought its perfect work or come to a definitive conclusion. Meantime war and politics have on the whole continued on the ancient plane; it may perhaps be fair to say that politics has so continued because warlike enterprise has continued still to be a matter of such personal forces as skill, dexterity and judgment, valor and cunning, personal force and fraud. Latterly, gradually, but increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the industrial arts.
What, if anything, is due by consequence to overtake the political strategy and the political preconceptions of the new century, is a question that will obtrude itself, though with scant hope of finding a ready answer. It may even seem a rash, as well as an ungraceful, undertaking to inquire into the possible manner and degree of prospective decay to which the received political ideals and virtues
would appear to be exposed by consequence of this derangement of the ancient discipline to which men have been subjected. So much, however, would seem evident, that the received virtues and ideals of patriotic animosity and national jealousy can best be guarded against untimely decay by resolutely holding to the formal observance of all outworn punctilios of national integrity and discrimination, in spite of their increasing disserviceability,—as would be done, e.g., or at least sought to be done, in the installation of a league of neutral nations to keep the peace and at the same time to safeguard those "national interests" whose only use is to divide these nations and keep them in a state of mutual envy and distrust.
Those peoples who are subject to the constraining governance of this modern state of the industrial arts, as all modern peoples are in much the same measure in which they are "modern," are, therefore, exposed to a workday discipline running at cross purposes with the received law and order as it takes effect in national affairs; and to this is to be added that, with warlike enterprise also shifted to this same mechanistic-technological ground, war can no longer be counted on so confidently as before to correct all the consequent drift away from the ancient landmarks of dynastic, pseudo-dynastic, and national enterprise in dominion.
As has been noted above, modern warfare not only makes use of, and indeed depends on, the modern industrial technology at every turn of the operations in the field, but it draws on the ordinary industrial resources of the countries at war in a degree and with an urgency never equalled. No nation can hope to make a stand in modern warfare, much less to make headway in warlike