In every civilization final decisions regarding domestic and foreign issues have been made by an appeal to arms. There were laws and legal institutions in many civilizations under which confrontations might have been prevented and armed conflict avoided. Where these legal means failed to provide solutions, contestants turned to armed force as the final arbiter. Competitive survival struggle has played a prominent role in the life of every civilization known to history. Competition at its highest level employs armed force as its instrument of policy. War, domestic and foreign has, therefore, dominated the history of every civilization. Walter Bagehot called war a state maker. In the same context, war may be referred to as a civilization maker. Conflict, including war, has played a major role, often a determining role in building and maintaining civilizations. It has also been a major and perhaps _the_ major factor in undermining and destroying civilizations. Arnold Toynbee contends that war has been a "proximate cause" of the overthrow of one civilization after another. No observer of current western civilization can fail to note the determining part played by war during the first half of the present century. Every completed civilization known to historians has passed through a sociological life cycle: origin, growth, expansion, maturity, violent premature dismemberment and death in the competitive survival struggle or gradual decline and eventual dissolution. Every completed civilization has had small, local beginnings, on an island like Crete, or a group of islands like the Japanese Archipelago, or a tiny spot like Latium on the Tiber River, or an isolated area like the desert-surrounded Nile River Valley in Africa. The seed ground or nucleus of each civilization has been a small, well-knit group of vigorous, energetic people, well-led, living in an easily defended, limited area, enjoying relative isolation, but also having ready access to the outside world. At the beginning the growth cycle has moved slowly, from victory to victory, as competing neighboring peoples have been brought under the authority of the victor in local wars. After generations or centuries of struggle a point is reached at which the nucleus of the growing empire begins to expand, through trade, colonization, diplomatic alliances, conquest, into an era of survival struggle in which rival cities reach out for the same piece of fertile land, the same markets, the same mineral deposits. Again the life and death survival struggle tests out the people, their leaders, their ambitions, determination, tenacity.