In examining my critic’s balance sheet I remarked that were his figures as complete as they were absurdly incomplete and misleading, I should still have been unimpressed.  We all know that very marvellous results are possible with figures; but one can generally find some simple fact which puts them to the supreme test without undue mathematics.  I do not know whether it has ever happened to my critic, as it has happened to me, while watching the gambling in the casino of a Continental watering resort, to have a financial genius present weird columns of figures, which demonstrate conclusively, irrefragably, that by this system which they embody one can break the bank and win a million.  I have never examined these figures, and never shall, for this reason:  the genius in question is prepared to sell his wonderful secret for twenty francs.  Now, in the face of that fact I am not interested in his figures.  If they were worth examination they would not be for sale.

And so in this matter there are certain test facts which upset the adroitest statistical legerdemain.  Though, really, the fallacy which regards an addition of territory as an addition of wealth to the “owning” nation is a very much simpler matter than the fallacies lying behind gambling systems, which are bound up with the laws of chance and the law of averages and much else that philosophers will quarrel about till the end of time.  It requires an exceptional mathematical brain really to refute those fallacies, whereas the one we are dealing with is due simply to the difficulty experienced by most of us in carrying in our heads two facts at the same time.  It is so much easier to seize on one fact and forget the other.  Thus we realize that when Germany has conquered Alsace-Lorraine she has “captured” a province worth, “cash value,” in my critic’s phrase, sixty-six millions sterling.  What we overlook is that Germany has also captured the people who own the property and who continue to own it.  We have multiplied by x, it is true, but we have overlooked the fact that we have had to divide by x, and that the resultant is consequently, so far as the individual is concerned, exactly what it was before.  My critic remembered the multiplication all right, but he forgot the division.

Just think of all the theories, the impossible theories for which the “practical” man has dragged the nations into war:  the Balance of Power, for instance.  Fifteen or twenty years ago it was the ineradicable belief of fifty or sixty million Americans, good, honest, sincere, and astute folk, that it was their bounden duty, their manifest interest, to fight—­and in the words of one of their Senators, annihilate—­Great Britain, in the interests of the Monroe Doctrine (which is a form of the “Balance of Power").  I do not think any one knew what the Monroe Doctrine meant, or could coherently defend it.  An American Ambassador had an after-dinner story at the time.