I regard the economic factor as the dominant and decisive element. The soldier is going down and the economist is coming up. War has become more and more a matter of mechanical arrangement. Modern battles will be decided, so far as they can be decided at all, by men lying in improvised ditches, which they have scooped out to protect themselves from the fire of a distant and invisible enemy. As a profession, militarism is growing less attractive.

Turning to another aspect of the matter, he said:

No one who has seen anything of the squalor and wretchedness, the struggle with fever and famine, in the rural districts of Russia, especially when there has been a failure of harvest, can be other than passionate to divert for the benefit of the people some of the immense volume of wealth that is spent in preparing for this impossible war. The children of most Russian peasants come into the world almost like brute beasts, without any medical or skilled attendance at childbirth. Can you imagine the way in which infants are left inside the home of most Russian peasants, where the mothers have to leave them to labour in the fields? The child is left alone to roll around the earthern floor of the hut, and as it will cry for hunger, poultices of chewed black bread are tied around its hands and feet so that the little creature may have something to suck at until its mother returns.

In view of this dire poverty of scores of millions in Russia, and of the illiteracy of ninety per cent. of the recruits, he used his genius to demonstrate

the folly of the modern world in attempting to gain wealth or safety by more armaments.

Bloch's studies were inspired by profound interest in suffering humanity and by clear perception of the inexpressible folly of war under modern conditions. He provided at Lucerne a Museum of Peace and War, and desired to have this duplicated in every great capital. Six months before his death in 1902, he said to the writer at a London breakfast, after discussing his theories at length, "Madam, whenever you talk to people on this subject, don't waste your time in telling them how wicked they are; tell them what fools they

In 1910 there appeared in England a little book entitled, Europe's Optical Illusion, written by Norman Angell, a man unknown to fame, though a few Americans had found much food for thought in two papers on "American Patriotism" and "American Farming" in a previous book of his entitled Patriotism Under Three Flags. Before the year was over, Count von Metternich, German Ambassador to England, delivered a speech which was a frank paraphrase of this little book, it had been quoted at length in the French Assembly, had attracted the attention of King Edward and the Kaiser, and was confounding the admirals and diplomats of Europe, including Sir Edward Grey, who declared that the "illusion," viz., the false and futile idea of the economic advantage of military victory, had first dawned on his vision through

reading this book. The chiefs of four European states asked for a book in place of a booklet; whereupon, a year later appeared The Great Illusion, embodying the gist of criticisms on the earlier book that had filled columns of the newspapers, together with their keen and cogent refutation.

Who was the master mind which from obscurity had thus leaped to eminence? Ralph Norman Angell Lane, born in England in 1874, and bred in Norfolk and Lincolnshire, was educated privately and sent at an early age to the Lycée de Saint Omer in France and afterwards to Switzerland. Soon after leaving school, he went to California for his health, and became a naturalised American citizen. In the West he was brought into touch with American politicians and was profoundly impressed with the fierceness of the Anglophobia which prevailed there at that time. Undoubtedly it was his American experience which, nearly twenty years ago, started the whole train of thought which has marked his work since. He has explained how, day after day, he heard from the mouths of American politicians that Great Britain was plotting the downfall of America, that the one duty of Americans was to annihilate Great Britain. He himself has said of that experience: "It roughly comes to this: seventy or eighty millions of kindly, honest, sincere, and intelligent people talking arrant nonsense and all of them absolutely wrong. When such a thing is possible there is something radically at fault with the