There will be no advance save through an improved tradition. Perhaps it will be impossible to improve the tradition. Very well, then the old order, whether among the nations of Europe or the political parties of Venezuela, will remain unchanged. More 'force,' more soldiers, will not do it. The disturbed areas of Spanish-America each show a greater number of soldiers to population than States like Massachusetts or Ohio. So in the international solution. What would it have availed if Britain had quadrupled the quantity of rifles to Koltchak's peasant soldiers so long as his land policy caused them to turn their rifles against his Government? Or for France to have multiplied many times the loans made to the Ukraine, if at the same time the loans made to Poland so fed Polish nationalism that the Ukrainians preferred making common cause with the Bolsheviks to becoming satellites of an Imperialist Poland? Do we add to the 'force' of the Alliance by increasing the military power of Serbia, if that fact provokes her to challenge Italy? Do we strengthen it by increasing at one and the same time the military forces of two States--say Poland and Czecho-Slovakia--if the nationalism which we nurse leads finally to those two States turning their forces one against the other? Unless we know the policy (again a thing of the mind, of opinion) which will determine the use to which guns will be put, it does not increase our security--it may diminish it--to add more guns. _The Alternative Risks_ We see, therefore, that the alternatives are not in fact a choice between 'material' and 'spiritual' means. The material can only operate, whether for our defence or against us, by virtue of a spiritual thing, the will. 'The direction in which the gun will shoot'--a rather important point in its effectiveness as a defensive weapon--depends not on the gun but on the mind of the man using it, the moral factor. The two cannot be separated. It is untrue to say that the knife is a magic instrument, saving the cancer patient's life: it is the mind of the surgeon using the material thing in a certain way which saves the patient's life. A child or savage who, failing to realise the part played by the invisible element of the surgeon's mind, should deem that a knife of a particular pattern used 'boldly' could be depended upon to cure cancer, would merely, of course commit manslaughter. It is foolish to talk of an absolute guarantee of security by force, as of guarantee of success in surgical operations by perfection of knives. In both cases we are dealing with instruments, indispensable, but not of themselves enough. The mind behind the instrument, technical in one case, social in the other, may in both cases fail; then we must improve it. Merely to go on sharpening the knife, to go on applying, for instance, to the international problem more 'force,' in the way it has been applied in the past, can only give us in intenser degree the present results.