12 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



by the continent of Europe, the scandal and paradox 

 of the world, says the Honourable George Peel, was 

 that European history was a tale of blood and 

 slaughter. 1 But always hitherto this record had 

 been shamed into irrelevancy by the permanence 

 and supremacy of the vision in the background. 



Within the short space of some fifty years all this 

 has been changed. Those living have watched 

 civilization becoming openly and of set purpose 

 a universal place of arms. Within the half-century, 

 by a process of development marking the intensity 

 of the causes at work, they have seen standing 

 armies, on a scale previously quite unknown, becoming 

 a normal feature of the life of modern communities. 

 The sun has followed its daily course from East 

 to West over the nations of the world standing 

 to arms and preparing for war. The full significance 

 of the change, moreover, has lain in the fact that 

 now it was preparation for war without any higher 

 vision whatever of peace perduring in the back- 

 ground. 



For the changes in the direction of thought have 

 been far-reaching and rapid. The state of war 

 became spoken of again among men not as a shame 

 and a rebuke to civilization but as a state of nature. 

 During the first period of the twentieth century 



1 The Future of England, p. 169. 



