Three Kinds of Physical Force 177 



ment in civilization — force — which has created and 

 now upholds society, giving efficacy to the pronounce- 

 ments of law, whether by the legislature or in the 

 courts. Organized force, alone, enables the quiet 

 and the weak to go about their business and to sleep 

 securely, safe from the assaults of violence without 

 or within. 



It is clear that Admiral Mahan would not con- 

 tradict himself so flatly as in these two passages, 

 if he did not labour under a fundamental confu- 

 sion, which runs through all his writing and 

 through that of practically all militarists, as to 

 the real nature of physical force. 



Three kinds of physical force must be distin- 

 guished in order to reason clearly upon the subject 

 and to avoid the self-contradiction to which Ad- 

 miral Mahan falls a victim when he thus includes 

 all three under the one term armament. These 

 three kinds of physical force are: 



1. Force used for attack — aggression. 



2. Force used to neutralize attack — defence. 



3. Force used to prevent attack — police force.* 



It is clearly the last of these — police force — 

 that Admiral Mahan means when he speaks of 



' A convenient classification would be obtained if the first two 

 kinds of force — aggression and defence — should be characterized 

 as violence, while the third form — police force — acting always 

 under the direction of law, and in the service of society as a 

 whole, should alone be characterized as force. 



