Even before the war a series of melancholy public mis-adventures had gone some way to awake the disquieting notion that civilization, the whole ordered, fruitful joint action of a nation, a continent, or the whole world, was only a bluff. When the world is at peace and fares well, the party of order and decency, justice and mercy and self-control, is really bluffing a much larger party of egoism and greed that would bully and grab if it dared. The deep anti-social offence of the "suffragettes," with their hatchets and hunger-strikes, was that they gave away, in some measure, the bluff by which non-criminal people had hitherto kept some control over reluctant assentors to the rule of mutual protection and forbearance. They helped the baser sort to see that the bluff of civilization is at the mercy of anyone ready to run a little bodily risk in calling it. Sir Edward Carson took up the work. He "called" the bluff of the Pax Britannica, the presumption that armed treason to the law and order of the British Empire must lead to the discomfiture of the traitor, whoever he was; he presented Sinn Fein and every other would-be insurgent with proof that treason may securely do much more than peep at what it would; British subjects, he showed, might quite well conspire for armed revolt against the King's peace and not be any losers, in their own persons, by doing it. The greatest of all bluffs, the general peace of the world and the joint civilization of Europe, remained uncalled for a year or two more. It was a high moral bluff. People were everywhere saying that world-war was too appalling, too frantically wicked a thing for any government to invite or procure. Peace, they argued, held a hand irresistibly strong. Had she not, among her cards, every acknowledged precept of Christianity and of morality, even of wisdom for a man's self or a nation's? Potsdam called the world's bluff, and the world's hand was found to be empty. Potsdam lost the game in the end, but it had not called wholly in vain. To a Europe exhausted, divided, and degraded by five years of return to the morals of the Stone Age it had suggested how many things are as they are, how many things are owned as they are, how many lives are safely continued, merely because our birds of prey have not yet had the wit to see what would come of a sudden snatch made with a will and with assurance. The total number of policemen on a race-course is always a minute percentage of the total number of its thieves and roughs. The bad men are not held down by force; they are only bluffed by the pretence of it. They have got the tip now, and the plain man is dimly aware how surprisingly little there is to keep us all from slipping back into the state we were in when a man would kill another to steal a piece of food that he had got, and when a young woman was not safe on a road out of sight of her friends.