4 THE SCIENCE OF POWER 



leaguing of forces utterly unknown to textbooks. 

 They will make history for a thousand years to 

 come. But for the understanding of the great 

 transition going on around us the very elements 

 of thought do not at present exist. 



It has been a feature of the time which has 

 witnessed the greatest war in the history of the 

 human race to talk as if the existing conditions 

 of the West were the result of peculiar causes 

 introduced by a single nation or affecting a single 

 period of time. We must put aside such concep- 

 tions. The present conditions in the West are the 

 result of causes which are universal, which have 

 come slowly to a head in history, which extend far 

 beyond military aspects, and into the meaning 

 of which the development of the entire world will 

 in the future be drawn. 



It is a fact, the significance of which has been 

 almost overlooked in the past, that Western civiliza- 

 tion has been in a special and peculiar sense founded 

 upon force. All the reasoned knowledge of the 

 West is the science of force in one or other of its 

 phases. Our civilization has been brought to the 

 birth in time as the result of a process of force, 

 which is unparalleled in the development of the 

 race, and the conditions of which can almost 

 certainly never be reproduced in history. For 



