Page:Economic Development in Denmark Before and During the World War.djvu/11

Rh facts and principles with which the law itself will have to deal. It is not merely individual men or private corporations who now meet each other in the rough and tumble of a worldwide mart but states themselves, each representing its own population and seeking to foster its interests as a zealous and faithful agent. The chances of friction that are inherent in ordinary commerce inhere to-day in vast international transactions and will increase in the measure in which the intercourse grows. All this means a great increase in incentives to warfare, on the one hand, and in the motives for preventing it, on the other. Private commerce unites more than it separates those who participate in it, and it remains to be seen whether international commerce will act in the same way; but, in view of what modern war means, the human race will deserve to perish, and much of it will probably do so, if the forces of strife are allowed to get the upper hand. Whether they will or not—whether the recent economic changes will tend to reduce warfare or to increase it—depends on the ability of nations to create and maintain the instrumentalities that in the new state of the world are necessary.

Certain it is that the feeling which prevails to-day, the world over, is not one of security. The dread of further war is greater than it was before 1914. In some areas war still prevails, in others peace is held by a precarious tenure, and in all it can be firmly established only by conscious and intelligent action by the states themselves. Mere exhaustion holds war dogs temporarily in leash, but it will take more than that to tame them as they must be tamed if peace is made to last.

We here confront a wide difference between the several states in comparative desire for peace and disposition to maintain it. One portentous fact is the grim determination of Russian communists to extend their system by crude force from state to state. Bolshevism is government by the few and largely the bad masquerading as government for