The power of an Alliance (again we are dealing with things that are obvious but neglected) does not depend upon the sum of its material forces--navies, armies, artillery. It depends upon being able to assemble those things to a common purpose; in other words, upon policy fit to direct the instrument. If the policy, or certain moral elements within it, are such that one member of the Alliance is likely to turn his arms against the others, the extent of _his_ armament does not add to the strength of the Alliance. It was with ammunition furnished by Britain and France that Russia in 1919 and 1920 destroyed British and French troops. The present building of an enormous navy by America is not accepted in Britain as necessarily adding to the security of the British Empire. It is worth while to note how utterly fallacious are certain almost universal assumptions concerning the relation of war psychology to the problem of alliance solidarity. An English visitor to the United States (or an American visitor to England) during the years 1917-1918 was apt to be deluged by a flood of rhetoric to this effect: The blood shed on the same battle-fields, the suffering shared in common in the same common cause, would unite and cement as nothing had ever yet united the two great branches of the English-speaking race, destined by Providence.... But the same visitor moving in the same circle less than two years later found that this eternal cement of friendship had already lost its potency. Never, perhaps, for generations were Anglo-American relations so bad as they had become within a score or so of months of the time that Englishmen and Americans were dying side by side on the battle-field. At the beginning of 1921, in the United States, it was easier, on a public platform, to defend Germany than to present a defence of English policy in Ireland or in India. And at that period one might hear commonly enough in England, in trams and railway carriages, a repetition of the catch phrase, 'America next.' If certain popular assumptions as to war psychology were right, these things would be impossible.