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demonstrates that even the present armed peace is so costly that the burdens of it threaten social revolution in almost every country in Europe. Long before the reader comes to the end of de Bloch's elaborate computation he is ready to cry out on the inanity of the proposition that the only way to secure eternal is to waste so much valuable energy and treasure in preparing for war that war becomes impossible. Certainly no theory could be devised which is more cumbersome, more roundabout, more extravagant, than the reductio ad absurdum of the peace-secured-by-the-preparation-for-war theory. This appeal to prudence was constantly emphasized at the first Hague Conference and was shortly afterward demonstrated by Great Britain when she went to war in South Africa, where she was fined one hundred million pounds and lost ten thousand lives. The fact that Russia also, and the very Czar who invited the Conference, disregarded the conclusions of the Hague Tribunal makes this line of appeal at least for the moment seem impotent to influence empires which command enormous resources and which lodge the power of expenditure in officials who have nothing to do with accumulating the treasure they vote to expend.

It would, however, be the height of folly for