it means.  I am not speaking of individuals, I am speaking of a particular caste, military officials in the abstract, if you like to put it so, who, because their business is war, have not the slightest idea what the pacific social development of a people really means.  Militarism is simply a one-sided, partial point of view, and to enforce that upon a nation is as though a man with a pronounced squint were to be accepted as a man of normal vision.  We have seen what it involves in Germany.  In a less offensive form, however, it exists in most states, and its root idea is usually that the civilian as such belongs to a lower order of humanity, and is not so important to the State as the officer who discharges vague and for the most part useless functions in the War Office.[4] It is a swollen, over-developed militarism that has got us into the present mess, and one of our earliest concerns, when the storm is over, must be to put it into its proper place.  Let him who uses the sword perish by the sword.

[4] Thus it was the Military party in Bulgaria which drove her to the disastrous second Balkan war, and the Military party in Austria which insisted on the ultimatum to Servia.

DIPLOMACY

And I fear that there is another ancient piece of our international strategy which has been found wanting.  I approach with some hesitation the subject of diplomacy, because it contains so many elements of value to a state, and has given so many opportunities for active and original minds.  Its worst feature is that its operations have to be conducted in secret:  its best is that it affords a fine exemplification of the way in which the history and fortunes of states are—­to their advantage—­dependent upon the initiative of gifted and patriotic individuals.  But if we look back over the history of recent years, we shall discover that diplomacy has not fulfilled its especial mission.  According to a well-known cynical dictum a diplomatist is a man who is paid to lie for his country.  And, indeed, it is one of the least gracious aspects of the diplomatic career that it seems necessarily to involve the use of a certain amount of chicanery and falsehood, the object being to jockey opponents by means of skilful ruses into a position in which they find themselves at a disadvantage.  Clearly, however, there are better aims than these for diplomacy—­one aim in particular, which is the preservation of peace.  A diplomat is supposed to have failed if the result of his work leads to war.  It is not his business to bring about war.  Any king or prime minister or general can do that, very often with conspicuous ease.  A diplomat is a skilful statesman versed in international politics, who makes the best provision he can for the interests of his country, carefully steering it away from those rocks of angry hostility on which possibly his good ship may founder.

BALANCE OF POWER