spite of the absence of force, but because of the absence of force; and if you want to destroy the peace of that frontier from end to end, all you need to do is to send a regiment to protect it, launch a Dreadnought on those lakes, and establish a balance of power.  For every regiment or warship on one side will produce a regiment or warship on the other; and then your race for armaments will begin, and the poison will spread until the whole of America becomes like Europe, an armed camp of victims to the theory of strategic frontiers and of the Balance of Power.

Those theories, their application, and their consequences recently cost the world thirty million casualties and thousands of millions of pounds within a brief five years, and yet left the frontiers of Europe less secure than they were before.  Three thousand miles of frontier in North America have in more than a hundred years cost us hardly a life, or a limb, or a penny.  As we put those details side by side we realise quantula regitur mundus sapientia—­with how little wisdom do men rule the world.  Yet the truth was told us long ago that he that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city, and we might have learnt by our experience of the peace that the only conquest that really pays is the conquest of oneself.

The real peace of that North American frontier is due to no conquest of Americans by Canadians or of Canadians by Americans, but to their conquest of themselves and of that foolish pride of “heathen folk who put their trust in reeking tube and iron shard.”  Let us face the facts, whatever the visionaries and the blind may say.  So be it.  The war is a fact, and so is the desolation it has wrought.  But that Anglo-American frontier is also a fact, and so is that century of peace which happily followed upon the resolution to depend for the defence of that frontier on moral restraint instead of on military force.  Verily, peace hath her victories not less renowned than those of war.

THE ALTERNATIVE

We have, indeed, to face the facts, and the facts about the Balance of Power must dominate our deliberations and determine the fate of our programmes.  There may be no more war for a generation, but there can be no peace with a Balance of Power.  There can be nothing better than an armed truce; and an armed truce, with super-dreadnoughts costing from four to eight times what they did before the war, is fatal to any programme of retrenchment and reform.  We are weighted enough in all conscience with the debt of that war without the burden of preparation for another; and a Balance of Power involves a progressive increase in preparations for war.

Unless we can exorcise fear, we are doomed to repeat the sisyphean cycles of the past and painfully roll our programmes up the hill, only to see them dashed to the bottom, before we get to the top, by the catastrophe of war.  Fear is fatal to freedom; it is fear which alone gives militarism its strength, compels nations to spend on armaments what they fain would devote to social reform, drives them into secret diplomacy and unnatural alliances, and leads them to deny their just liberties to subject populations.  Fear is the root of reaction as faith is the parent of progress; and the incarnation of international fear is the Balance of Power.