Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/131



all the major wars of the past three centuries, one traces a certain progression from armed contest between individual nations to armed contest between alliances. Sometimes indeed, two hostile nations are “isolated,” as when the rest of Europe managed to keep out of the war between France and Germany in 1870. But the tendency remains. And there is a reasonable cause for this—the increasing speed and facility of transportation, the increasing interdependence of nations. In 1914, according to an authority on transportation, any man was in terms of time eleven times nearer to any given point in the world than in 1814. There you have one explanation for the world-wide spread of the Great War.

If things in this “new world” are to go in the old manner, the chancellories of Europe will seek to keep an impermanent peace, will give themselves a “breathing-space between wars” by forming alliances. With the major nations struggling even for greater advantage, with the smaller nations in growing fear of their own defencelessness, the alliances