several Radical newspapers, begin a campaign of shrieking claptrap, a just resentment will be felt by France and Russia. So the warfare of diplomacy may be more dangerous to the Allies than the warfare of stricken fields. We must wait and see. But the present position confirms another argument in this monograph: namely, that those who decline to see the perpetual strife that reigns in all human affairs, and who babble in a routine of fixed ideas about the illusion called peace, are quite as perilous to a country as were the creeds of bloodshed which many German writers advertised, taking liberties with the ingenuous pacifism coddled by British Governments. Let us delete from every dictionary the lying word peace; and let us believe firmly in the simple truth that strife everywhere is the historian of life. The strife in all its phases ought to be well trained and chivalric, of course; and it needs vast improvements in the campaigns of business warfare. Every slum, for example, is very much worse than the longest battle with firearms, because it endures for ages; and what chivalry in the wars of trade is as noble as that which grants to young men the privilege of defending the old age of their country from danger and dishonour? FOOTNOTES: [136] It is worth noting, as an example of British apathy in home defence, that the railway from Aldershot toward Southampton is for many miles a single line only, and that it passes over a good many gimcrack bridges and between some narrow and steep embankments, as in the neighbourhood of Medstead. The line is an open trap; it could be shut up in a dozen places by a few intelligent spies, if spying did not generate an excessive caution as futile as cowardice. [137] This bridge is 250 metres long, and the five arches have equal spans of 40 metres. Perronet died in 1791, at the age of eighty-three, and we study his best work at Mantes, Orléans, Nogent-sur-Seine, Pont-Saint-Maxence, Château-Thierry, and Neuilly-sur-Seine.