haps billions, of American dollars have been invested in new, promising commercial fields abroad. So, if we play the game as we find it, we shall enter the circle of “financial imperialism” and find ourselves in some way much more closely affected by the next war than we were by the last, and correspondingly under a greater urge to enter it as belligerents.
The spread of the next war may conceivably be limited by diplomacy as was the war of 1870; even go, the next one after that probably cannot be limited; and all our “proud isolation,” our tradition against entangling alliances, will not keep us out.
The Great War, considered in terms of economies, began not in 1914 but in 1871, when the French and Germans signed the Treaty of Frankfort—when the European nations began to increase their standing armaments. In the same sense, the next war began when, after the Armistice of 1918, the great powers kept up their armies, started experiments with more efficient but more expensive ways of killing. It will be war by machinery from now on, not war by hand. And machine-work requires a much greater initial outlay of capital than hand-work. Naval warfare has always been war by machinery. It will not be necessary for me to prove by figures the greater cost of a navy, in proportion to the number of men employed, than of an army. That is going to be changed. The tank and the aeroplane have come—air-machines and land-machines, equivalent to the destroyer, the submarine
