Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/164

 survive, these same Germans are calling France the source of all their woes, the true enemy. For the current is running in another direction, and the strategy of propaganda has changed. But this is a digression. Germany illustrates, among other things, the danger in the perfect defensive preparation and the difficulty of drawing the line between defence and offence.

Some may note that I have not touched upon the question of national honor. The individual in society sometimes meets a situation outside the law so intolerable that he is less than a man if he does not take the law into his own hands; and so it is with nations. The circumstance which drew us into the Great War was an unusually clean-cut example of an unpardonable affront. Germany had announced cold-bloodedly, flatly, that American vessels could no longer sail the most frequented seas of the world; if they did, the hulls would be destroyed, the crews killed without warning. The occasions of war are not commonly so simple as this. “National honor” is more often the excuse for economic and political interests, or the mere focus of trouble arising from a conflict of such interests. The occasion of the Great War, the spark which set the mine, was the assassination of an Austrian prince in Serbia. Behind that lay thirty or forty years of intrigue leading up to a “situation.” Austria wanted to make Serbia a vassal economically, and in the end