The material and spiritual results of defeat can easily be recognised by any one who takes the trouble to think about the question, though only experience either at first hand or supplied by history can enable a man fully to grasp its terrible nature. But a word must be said on the social and political consequences inseparable from the wreck of a State whose Government has been unable to fulfil its prime function, that of providing security for the national life. All experience shows that in such cases men do not take their troubles calmly. They are filled with passion. Their feelings find vent in the actions to which their previous currents of thought tended. The working class, long accustomed by its leaders to regard the capitalists as a class with interests and aims opposed to its own, will hardly be able in the stress of unemployment and of famine to change its way of thinking. The mass of the workmen, following leaders whose judgment may not perhaps be of the soundest but who will undoubtedly sincerely believe that the doctrines with which they have grown up are true, may assail the existing social order and lay the blame of their misfortunes upon the class which has hitherto had the government of the country in its hands and has supplied the leaders of both political parties. The indignation which would inspire this movement would not be altogether without justification, for it cannot be denied that both political parties have for many years regarded preparation for war and all that belongs to it as a minor matter, subordinate to the really far less important questions relying upon which each side has sought to win sufficient votes to secure a party majority. Why do I discuss the hypothesis of British defeat rather than that of British victory? Because it is the invariable practice of the masters of war to consider first the disagreeable possibilities and to make provision for them. But also because, according to every one of the tests which can be applied, the probability of defeat for Great Britain in the present state of Europe is exceedingly great. Rarely has a State unready for conflict been able to stand against a nation organised for war. The last of a long series of examples was the war between Russia and Japan, in which the vast resources of a great Empire were exhausted in the struggle with a State so small as to seem a pigmy in comparison with her giant adversary. On the 10th of February 1904, the day when the news reached England that the Russo-Japanese war had begun, I gave as follows my reasons for thinking that Japan would win:--