But this policy is merely a perpetuation on a larger scale of the principle of "each being stronger than the other." Military power, in any case, is a thing very difficult to estimate; an apparently weaker group or nation has often proved, in fact, to be the stronger, so that there is a desire on the part of both sides to give the benefit of the doubt to themselves. Thus the natural and latent effort to be strongest is obviously fatal to any "balance." Neither side, in fact, desires a balance; each desires to have the balance tilted in its favor. This sets up a perpetual tendency toward rearrangement, and regroupings and reshufflings in these international alliances sometimes take place with extraordinary and startling rapidity, as in the case of the Balkan States. It is already illustrated in the present war; Italy has broken away from a definite and formal alliance which every one supposed would range her on the German side. There is at least a possibility that she may finally come down upon the Anglo-Franco-Russian side. You have Japan, which little more than a decade ago was fighting bitterly against Russia, today ranged upon the side of Russia. The position of Russia is still more startling. In the struggles of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Britain was almost always on the side of Russia; then for two generations she was taught that any increase of the power of Russia was a particularly dangerous menace. That once more was a decade ago suddenly changed, and Britain is now fighting to increase both relatively and absolutely the power of a country which her last war on the Continent was fought to check. The war before that which Great Britain fought upon the Continent was fought in alliance with Germans against the power of France. As to the Austrians, whom Britain is now fighting, they were for many years her faithful allies. So it is very nearly true to say of nearly all the combatants respectively that they have no enemy today that was not, historically speaking, quite recently an ally, and not an ally today that was not in the recent past an enemy. These combinations, therefore, are not, never have been, and never can be permanent. If history, even quite recent history, has any meaning at all, the next ten or fifteen or twenty years will be bound to see among these tan combatants now in the field rearrangements and permutations out of which the crushed and suppressed Germany that is to follow the war--a Germany which will embrace, nevertheless, a hundred million of the same race, highly efficient, highly educated, trained for co-ordination and common action--will be bound sooner or later to find her chance.