How in practical politics are we to say when a group has become preponderantly powerful? We know to our cost that military power is extremely difficult of precise estimate. It cannot be weighed and balanced exactly. In political practice, therefore, the Balance of Power means a rivalry of power, because each to be on the safe side wants to be just a bit stronger than the other. The competition creates of itself the very condition it sets out to prevent. The defect of principle here is not the employment of force. It is the refusal to put force behind a law which may demand our allegiance. The defect lies in the attempt to make ourselves and our own interests by virtue of preponderant power superior to law. The feature which stood condemned in the old order was not the possession by States of coercive power. Coercion is an element in every good society that we have heretofore known. The evil of the old order was that in case of States the Power was anti-social; that it was not pledged to the service of some code or rule designed for mutual protection, but was the irresponsible possession of each individual, maintained for the express purpose of enabling him to enforce his own views of his own rights, to be judge and executioner in his own case, when his view came into collision with that of others. The old effort meant in reality the attempt on the part of a group of States to maintain in their own favour a preponderance of force of undefined and unlimited purpose. Any opposing group that found itself in a position of manifest inferiority had in fact to submit in international affairs to the decision of the possessor of preponderant power for the time being. It might be used benevolently; in that case the weaker obtained his rights as a gift from the stronger. But so long as the possession of power was unaccompanied by any defined obligation, there could be no democracy of States, no Society of Nations. To destroy the power of the preponderant group meant merely to transpose the situation. The security of one meant always the insecurity of the other. The Balance of Power in fact adopts the fundamental premise of the 'might makes right' principle, because it regards power as the ultimate fact in politics; whereas the ultimate fact is the purpose for which the power will be used. Obviously you don't want a Balance of Power between justice and injustice, law and crime; between anarchy and order. You want a preponderance of power on the side of justice, of law and of order. We approach here one of the commonest and most disastrous confusions touching the employment of force in human society, particularly in the Society of Nations. It is easy enough to make play with the absurdities and contradictions of the _si vis pacem para bellum_ of our militarists. And the hoary falsehood does indeed involve a flouting of all experience, an intellectual astigmatism that almost makes one despair. But what is the practical alternative?