a state of things most distasteful to it.  Let there be a change in the balance of forces and the discontented State will seize the opportunity, will assert itself, and if resisted will use its forces to overcome opposition.  A proposal for disarmament must necessarily be based upon the assumption that there is to be no change in the system, that the status quo is everywhere to be preserved.  This amounts to a guarantee of the decaying and inefficient States against those which are growing and are more efficient.  Such an arrangement would not tend to promote the welfare of mankind and will not be accepted by those nations that have confidence in their own future.  That such a proposal should have been announced by a British Government is evidence not of the strength of Great Britain, not of a healthy condition of national life, but of inability to appreciate the changes which have been produced during the last century in the conditions of Europe and the consequent alteration in Great Britain’s relative position among the great Powers.  It was long ago remarked by the German historian Bernhardi that Great Britain was the first country in Europe to revive in the modern world the conception of the State.  The feudal conception identified the State with the monarch.  The English revolution of 1688 was an identification of the State with the Nation.  But the nationalisation of the State, of which the example was set in 1688 by Great Britain, was carried out much more thoroughly by France in the period that followed the revolution of 1789; and in the great conflict which ensued between France and the European States the principal continental opponents of France were compelled to follow her example, and, in a far greater degree than has ever happened in England, to nationalise the State.  It is to that struggle that we must turn if we are to understand the present condition of Europe and the relations of Great Britain to the European Powers.

V.

THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR

The transformation of society of which the French Revolution was the most striking symptom produced a corresponding change in the character of war.

By the Revolution the French people constituted itself the State, and the process was accompanied by so much passion and so much violence that it shortly involved the reconstituted nation in a quarrel with its neighbours the Germanic Empire and Prussia, which rapidly developed into a war between France and almost all the rest of Europe.  The Revolution weakened and demoralised the French army and disorganised the navy, which it deprived of almost all its experienced officers.  When the war began the regular army was supplemented by a great levy of volunteers.  The mixed force thus formed, in spite of early successes, was unable to stand against the well-disciplined armies of Austria and Prussia, and as the war continued, while the French