sets of interests at about equal strength. If you expect to make a successful aggressive war, you must have a superiority of forces. Two nations about even in military resources are not likely to fight. The risk of failure is too great. And so with two alliances. But all this time, another current was running strongly among European nations. Each alliance was struggling to build up stronger potential power than the other. This helped when, as happened every four or five years, there rose a visible conflict of interests. The stronger you were in a military way, the stronger would be the situation of your diplomats. Every year, the European “race of armaments” grew more intense.
Expressed in less abstract terms, this was the general state of Europe during the forty or fifty years which followed the Franco-Prussian war:
On the Continent, military conscription had become universal. If Great Britain did not follow, it was because she, an island kingdom, was checking armies with an unprecedented navy. On the Continent, every young man must serve his two or three years with the colors, learning to be a modern soldier. Retired to the Reserve, he must at intervals drop his work and drill again, in order “to keep his sword bright.” The financial burden of arming this soldier grew even greater. As I shall presently show, weapons of warfare never until recently improved so fast as industrial tools; but they did improve almost too rapidly for the finances of the
