And it should be noted that this international co-operation is not by any means always with similar and racially allied nations. Republican France finds itself, and has been for a generation, the ally of autocratic Russia. Australia, that much more than any other country has been obsessed by the yellow peril and the danger from Japan, finds herself today fighting side by side with the Japanese. And as to the ineradicable hostility of races preventing international co-operation, there are fighting together on the soil of France as I write, Flemish, Walloons, and negroes from Senegal, Turcos from Northern Africa, Gurkhas from India, co-operating with the advance on the other frontier of Cossacks, and Russians of all descriptions. This military and political co-operation has brought together Mohammedan and Christian; Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox; negro, white and yellow; African, Indian, and European; monarchist, republican, Socialist, reactionary—there seems hardly a racial, religious, or political difference that has stood in the way of rapid and effective co-operation in the common need.
Thus the soldier himself, while defending the old nationalist and exclusive conceptions, is helping to shrink the spaces of the world and break down old isolations and show how interests at the uttermost ends of the earth react one upon the other.
But even apart from this influence, as already noted, America cannot escape the military any more than she has escaped the commercial and financial effects of this war. She may never be drawn into active military co-operation with other nations, but she is affected none the less—by a demand for a naval programme immensely larger than any American could have anticipated a year since, by plans for an enormously enlarged army.
That, it will be argued, is the one thing needed—to be stronger than our prospective enemy. And, of course, any enemy—whether he be one nation or a group—who really does contemplate aggression, would on his side take care to be stronger than us. War and peace are matters of two parties, and any principle which you may lay down for one is applicable to the other. When we say "Si vis pacem, para bellum" we must apply it to all parties. One eminent upholder of this principle has told us that the only way to be sure of peace is to be so much stronger than your enemy that he will not dare to attack you. Apply that to the two parties and you get this result—here are two nations or two groups of nations likely to quarrel. How shall they keep the peace? And we say quite seriously that they will keep the peace if each is stronger than the other.
This principle, therefore, which looks at first blush like an axiom, is, as a matter of fact, an attempt to achieve a physical impossibility and always ends, as it has ended in Europe on this occasion, in explosion. You cannot indefinitely pile up explosive material without an accident of some sort occurring; it is bound to occur. But you will note this: that the militarist—while avowing by his conduct that nations can no longer in a military sense be independent, that they are obliged to co-operate with others and consequently depend upon some sort of an arrangement, agreement, compact, alliance with others—has adopted a form of compact which merely perpetuates the old impossible situation on a larger scale! He has devised the "balance of power."
For several generations Britain, which has occupied with reference to the Continent of Europe somewhat the position which we are now coming to occupy with regard to Europe as a whole, has acted on this principle—that so long as the powers of the Continent were fairly equally divided she felt she could with a fair chance of safety face either one or the other. But if one group became so much stronger than the other 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, therefore, are not, never have been, and never can be permanent. If history, even quite recent history, has any meaning at all, the next ten or fifteen or twenty years will be bound to see among these tan combatants now in the field rearrangements and permutations out of which the crushed and suppressed Germany that is to follow the war—a Germany which will embrace, nevertheless, a hundred million of the same race, highly efficient, highly educated, trained for co-ordination and common action—will be bound sooner or later to find her chance.